The Amharic alphabet, every letter and every form

Each row of the chart is one consonant. Each column is one vowel, and the seven columns have names that are recited in order — ግዕዝ (Ge'ez), ካዕብ (Ka'ib), ሣልስ (Salis), ራብዕ (Rabi'), ኃምስ (Hamis), ሳድስ (Sadis), ሳብዕ (Sabi'). The consonant keeps its shape; a mark on it says which vowel follows.

That is the entire system, and it is what makes the script learnable in an afternoon despite its size. Learn one row and you have learned the rule for all 37 of them.

37 consonant series against all seven orders — 259 characters, with the keys that produce them underneath. On a phone the table scrolls sideways; the consonant column and the order row both stay put.

A few consonants take a rounded, w-coloured shape — the ኳ in ኳስ (ball), the ጓ in ጓደኛ (friend). They have five forms rather than seven. In Ezra a capital W after the consonant reaches the series, and the same vowel keys then choose the form.

Nothing on this page is transcribed. The characters and the keystrokes are both read out of tables/phonetic-am-v3.tbl at build time, and a series only appears in the chart if all of its forms are bound and the characters they produce are consecutive in the Unicode Ethiopic block — a test that keeps keys which merely look like the head of a series out of a chart that would otherwise be wrong in one row.

If you want the reasoning behind the keys rather than the keys themselves — why the sixth order gets a letter of its own, and how to reach the sounds Amharic spells more than one way — that is on the keyboard layout page.