እንግሊዝ

The Ethiopian language Ge'ez has a very beautiful alphabet, which is in actual fact an abugida script, meaning that each consonant has its own inherent vowel. So for each consonant, there are as many forms of it as there are Ge'ez vowels. The Ge'ez word in title of this essay is from the ACG Ethiopia Page, and appears next to the words "United Kingdom", meaning that it's presumably a translation. This is reinforced by the phonetic value of the word:

• እ: ʾÄlf (አ) combined with ə
• ን: Nähas (ነ) combined with ə
• ግ: Gäml (ገ) combined with ə
• ሊ: Läwe (ለ) combined with i
• ዝ: Zäy (ዘ) combined with ə

Hence it's very roughly pronounced "ahnuhgulizuh", which is phonetically close enough to "England" to make me think it's just a transcription of the phonetic value, and hence a loanword. Ge'ez is descended from South Arabian, though by which method is a very contentious issue, and bears a more than passing resemblance to the original Phoenician values which all alphabetic languages are related to.

There is a considerably body of interesting literature written in Ge'ez, including the Kəbrä Nägäst, an allegorical tale about King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Sacred Texts has the full text of it online, as translated by the prolific antiquarian Sir E.A. Wallis Budge.

My Encoding Normaliser service was very useful when writing this essay: it let me copy out some Unicode from Wikipedia etc., and then paste it in and convert it into HTML entities, since I don't have emacs set up to correctly handle utf-8 input as far as I can tell, and entities seem possibly more robust anyway.