Developing a Writing System Application to Standardize the Ethiopian Fidäl Similar Sound Scripts

Terefe, Mikru

dc.contributor.author	Terefe, Mikru
dc.date.accessioned	2022-09-05T12:14:30Z
dc.date.available	2022-09-05T12:14:30Z
dc.date.issued	2022-07
dc.identifier.uri	http://ir.bdu.edu.et/handle/123456789/14081
dc.description.abstract	The Ethiopic fidäl is the most commonly used script for writing systems of the majority languages spoken in Ethiopia. Among the twenty-two basic Ethiopic scripts, nine sounds which have different shapes, forenames, and identical pronunciations represent more than one graphic symbol. However, these scripts are appeared differently in many texts and scholars have also written those scripts in arbitrary way even within a given single word. This brings meaning change and sometimes some words remains senseless in some context. As a result, this issue becomes a topic for debating and remains unclear. Inconsistencies in the use of similar sound scripts become a common problem among the scholars. Therefore, to fill this knowledge gap and to minimize the inconsistency, this study aims at developing a writing system application to standardize the Ethiopic similar sound scripts. To achieve this stated objective, data was collected from one Amharic dictionary and four selected Ethiopic dictionaries. The collected data was triangulated each other to measure their level of similarity and differences. Also, the result of the self triangulated data taken from dictionaries was again triangulated with five hymns of St. Yared and Psalms published in 1952 E.C. Finally, the validity and reliability of the majority connivance was cross checked by the selected key informants. Then, the writing system application has designed and developed using C-Sharp (C#) programming language and the knowledge base (KB) was structured using Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). The study reveals that the developed software replaces the wrong typed script with the correct one by itself in a given word. Also, when a word has double meaning, the software gives an alternative at the right side of the editor for the user to choose the correct one using his or her linguistic competence. The findings suggest that further investigations are needed in order to alleviate the problem and to keep consistency in wider range among the Ethiopic scholars by including the conjugation of all verbs and by including other features of the developed software.	en_US
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.subject	Gəʾəz	en_US
dc.title	Developing a Writing System Application to Standardize the Ethiopian Fidäl Similar Sound Scripts	en_US
dc.type	Thesis	en_US