B.1.2.1 The Ethiopic Syllabary

Even though the Ethiopic script has more than 210 distinct characters Aspell can still handle it. The idea is to split each character into two parts based on the Consonant and Vowel parts. This encoding of the syllabary is far more useful to Aspell than if they were stored in UTF-8 or UTF-16. In fact, the exiting suggestion strategy of Aspell will work well with this encoding without any additional modifications. However, additional improvements may be possible by taking advantage of the consonant-vowel structure of this encoding.

In fact, the split consonant-vowel representation may prove to be so useful that it may be beneficial to encode other syllabary in this fashion, even if they are less than 210 of them.

The code to break up a syllabary into the consonant-vowel part is part of the Unicode normalization process.