The importance of families:

......If we look at the English language, we will find that are vowels that play major rolls in creating different sounds from one constant. For example, take the constant 'R' and add different vowels to it…we can have "Ra", "Re", "Ri", "Ro", and "Ru". As a result of the vowels, we can generate at least 5 different sounds from the constant 'R'. To hear this, click on the red boxes below (audio not available in demo version). The red arrows point to words that contain the two letters (high lighted in yellow) from the red boxes. Read these words out loud and pay attention to how the highlighted letters are pronounced.
......Now take a look at where the green arrows are pointing.....these are the equivalent Amharic letters to what you have just heard. Click on the Amharic letters to hear how they are pronounced. You can see that they are pronounced exactly like the high lighted letters in the words above them!
(Note: Button R-1 and R-6 are left blank for the time being to simplify the example.)
......Remember the group and family analogy? What you see here is one group with minor variations on how it is pronounced. Just like the piano gives different sounds at different frequencies, the constant 'R' gives five different phonic sounds in this example. Therefore, the phonic difference between families in Amharic would be the equivalent of using vowels to generate different sounds from the same constant in English.
The heading in blue above the red boxes (R-1, R-2, ... R-7) are the family numbers for this group. Let's look at one more example...click next.
(Note: we have intentionally disregarded that two vowels can create the same sound depending on the word. For example, both "root" and "ruler" give the same 'ru' sound even though they use different vowels.)