Rules of Ethiopic Line Breaking

Issue: In classical Ethiopic writing words may be split across lines at arbitrary positions within the word. The Ethiopic wordspace used in classical writing would help insure that no ambiguity could occur. In modern Ethiopic writing where whitespace replaces Ethiopic wordspace it is not always certain if a word has been split across lines or if two independent words are present. A recommendation of rules to follow for Ethiopic line breaking would help benefit clarity and the processing of Ethiopic documents.

View: Line breaking in modern Ethiopic writing should not be arbitrary and good line breaking rules need to be promoted.

Recommendation: The Ethiopian Writers Association recommends that line breaking of Ethiopic text be governed by the following rules:

• A word is split at a location where the user would not be able to infer from context whether one or two words appears across lines. I.E. a split should not occur at the boundary of a compound word.
• The hyphen symbol should be applied when a word is split over lines.
• Numbers are not split over lines.
• Words of a single syllable are not split over lines.
• Words of two letters are not split over lines.
• Only letters, numbers, or opening punctuation may start a new line.