Ge'ez script
Tigrinya has traditionally been written using the same Ge'ez alphabet ("fidel") as Amharic and Tigrayit. It has also met with the linguistic difficulty of the Ge'ez script being a syllabic system which does not distinguish long vowels from short ones. While this works well for writing Tigrinya or Amharic, which do not rely on vowel length in words, it does complicate writing Tigre, where vowel length sometimes distinguishes one word and its meaning from another. The Ge'ez script evolved from the Epigraphic South Arabian script, whose first inscriptions are from the 8th century BC in Yemen, Eritrea and Ethiopia.