Chapter 04 · the centrepiece

The fifteen Amharic problems

Amharic has more than 20 million mother-tongue speakers and its own script, Fidel, an abugida of about 300 syllabic characters. The working assumption was that translation would be handled by partners' models and the job was aggregation and structure. What follows is every concrete problem hit, in the order a builder meets them.

For your AI

Look at this file and describe the site: https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/site_guide.txt

01DesignThe stack was built English-first without anyone deciding that 02TranslationMachine translation is weak enough that human review is the product 03ExtractionA deterministic one-character corruption, caught only by exact bytes 04ExtractionInline markup clipped one assertion in five on BBC Amharic 05EncodingByte slicing mojibaked the native-speaker review bundle 06JoinsFree-text roles in two scripts broke the join 07IdentityTransliteration has no standard, and geography is time-indexed 08IdentityEntity matching was degenerate 09Linked dataWikidata has no Amharic labels for most concepts 10SpeechSpeech: the one ASR attempt died on a missing DLL 11SpeechASR gets proper nouns wrong; the chyrons have them spelled right 12SpeechSinging and gemination 13EncodingScript and encoding at the edges 14CalendarCalendar and clock 15RightsRights and provenance of anything translated

build report §4 · u--ra9 · u--ra9.1 · retrieved 2026-08-21

Why these are the centrepiece

Amharic is classified as low-resource in the linguistic linked-data literature. Nobody on the team anticipated most of what is listed here, and that is the point of listing it: each problem is concrete, each has a date and a ticket, and most of them would be met again by anyone building a corpus in a language with its own script and under two validated hours of public speech. The problems are grouped by where a builder meets them: design, translation, extraction, encoding, joins, identity, linked data, speech, calendar and rights.

One rule governs every page in this chapter: Ethiopic text renders from your device's system fonts, never a webfont, and every Amharic string on this site is marked as awaiting native-speaker review unless stated otherwise.

Ask your AI about this page

Paste this page's link into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant and ask your question in your own words. Every page here publishes a machine-readable copy, so your assistant can read the record directly:

https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/problems/

Every page here has a markdown twin; this page's is https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/problems/index.md (also served with .txt appended). The whole site is mapped in one small file at https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/site_guide.txt, https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/llms.txt describes how the record is organized, and https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/agents/ carries the site's notes for assistants.

Published August 22, 2026 at 15:13 UTC. Last updated August 22, 2026 at 15:42 UTC. Times come from this page's revision history and can be checked against it.