While in Washington
While we were in Washington, D.C., for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, we went across town to eat at an Ethiopian restaurant. (Great food, as usual.) Even there, right in our nation’s capital, we spotted some unfamiliar scripts. One is the ribbon-like Ge’ez script; can anyone help me out by identifying the other?
July 22, 2013 @ 9:59 pm
They’re actually all the Ge’ez script – the ones with the horizontal writing in white and black are in the most common typeface, the one in green is a funky, futuristic looking typeface. The vertical one is also definitely Ge’ez, but it’s in a typeface I’ve never seen before – quite a cool one, if I do say so myself!
It says “ሐበሻ” (‘Habesha’), meaning “Semitic-speaking Ethiopian or Eritrean”. Some non-Semitic speaking Ethiopians also identify with the term, so sometimes it just means “Ethiopian or Eritrean”. The English term “Abyssinia” ultimately derives from the word.