Res (Ra) ረ

Res writes a plain r, and its cognates are the Hebrew resh, the Syriac rish and the Arabic ra. The Northwest Semitic name means head, and it is one of the acrophonic names the Canaanite alphabet is built from, the sign being named for a word that begins with its sound.

What makes this letter worth a second look is that the sense has not been lost on the Ge'ez side. Ge'ez has the word re'es for a head, from the same Semitic root, and it is a live word, used for a head, a top, a chief and the first item of a series. The letter name res and that word are recognisably the same thing. For most letters of the fidel no such statement can be made, because the names have worn away from any word still in the language, but here the connection is visible without reconstruction.

That is worth saying precisely because it cannot be generalised. Two or three Ge'ez letter names still show their word, with bet and gaml the other clear cases. The rest do not, and a chart that assigns a meaning to all twenty-six has filled the gaps in from Hebrew. The atlas leaves them empty and says why, which is less satisfying to read and is the only honest option available.

That is also why the atlas records a meaning against three of these twenty-six rows and leaves the rest blank rather than filling them evenly. An uneven record that matches the evidence is more useful than a complete one that does not, and a reader can see at a glance which letters have a name that still means something and which have only a name.

The seven vowel orders of the fidel have names, and the names are Ge'ez ordinals: the first is ge'ez, the second ka'eb, the third salis, the fourth rabi', the fifth hamis, the sixth sadis and the seventh sabi'. Rabi', the fourth, begins with this letter.

Those names are a small piece of evidence about how the system was understood by the people who used it. They are not descriptions of vowels. Nobody named an order after the sound it carries. They are positions in a row, counted, which means the row itself is the unit being taught. A letter is a row of seven, recited across, and a vowel is identified by where it falls in the recitation rather than by any name of its own. A speaker asked which order a sign belongs to answers with an ordinal, not with a vowel.

The first order name is the same word as the name of the language, ge'ez, which in this use carries the sense of the plain or unmodified form. A child reciting the grid begins each row in the ge'ez order and works across it. The atlas holds the twenty-six rows as its letters and treats the orders as a property of the script rather than as separate entries, which follows the way the fidel is actually taught and chanted rather than the way a character table lists it.