Pollard Script (Miao)

The Pollard script is the alphabet of the A-Hmao, the Large Flowery Miao (Dahua Miao) of north-east Yunnan and western Guizhou, roughly 300,000 people in the mountains between Zhaotong, Weining, Kunming and Qujing. A-Hmao is a Hmongic language with eight tones, a cousin of the Hmong spoken in Laos, Vietnam and the United States, which uses the Latin letters of the Hmong Daw (White Hmong) Alphabet and Hmong Njua (Green Hmong) Alphabet instead. In China the script is called 柏格理苗文 (Bó Gélǐ Miáowén, 'Pollard Miao writing') or 老苗文, 'old Miao writing', to tell it from the Pinyin-style Latin alphabet the government introduced in 1957; Unicode simply calls the block Miao.

It was never only a Miao script. Pollard's colleagues and successors adapted it for neighbouring languages, and the Unicode technical note on Miao (Lorna Evans, 2024) lists seven in current use: A-Hmao, Sinicized Miao (Hmong Shua), Small Flowery Miao (Xiaohua Miao), and four languages of other families: Lipo (Eastern Lisu), Gepo (Bai Yi), Gan Yi (Laka) and Nasu (Black Yi, Wuding-Luquan Yi). Eastern Lisu writes with Pollard letters while western Lisu uses the Fraser alphabet of the Lisu Alphabet collection, and the Yi languages of Yunnan use it where the Yi Script & Syllables of Sichuan are not read. Kaduo and the Hmong Daw of Sichuan used it in the past. The 2010 encoding proposal estimated 200,000 to 500,000 users across all these groups, with hymnals, Bibles, bilingual school materials and a steady trickle of new print.

Many of the characters in the grid are therefore marked 'used in Hei Yi', 'used in Bai Yi' or 'used in Eastern Lisu' in the Unicode chart: an A-Hmao reader uses perhaps 40 consonants and 25 finals, and the rest belong to the other languages or to older spellings. The full set is here so that a text in any of them can be copied.

How the Pollard script works: big letters, small letters, tone by position

Pollard's idea, borrowed from the Cree syllabics of James Evans, is that every syllable is one initial consonant written large, followed by its vowel or final written small: 𖼀 pa, 𖼊 ta, 𖼞 ka, 𖼄 ma are consonants, and 𖽔 a, 𖽙 o, 𖽡 i, 𖽪 u, 𖽗 an, 𖽘 ang are finals. Written in a row, 𖼀𖽔 is the syllable pa. Because the vowel is always needed, the script is an abugida like Cree or Devanagari rather than a true alphabet; a consonant on its own is not a syllable. Text runs left to right, in lines like Chinese or English, and the same Chinese and Latin punctuation is used, with Western digits; Miao printers follow the Chinese habit of underlining personal names.

The clever part is tone. A-Hmao has eight tones, and instead of adding a tone letter, Pollard moved the small vowel: on the baseline for one tone, raised to the top right for another, above the consonant for a third, below it for a fourth. In Unicode the vowel sign is typed after the consonant and, if it must leave the baseline, one of four invisible shifters follows it: 𖾏 right, 𖾐 top right, 𖾑 above, 𖾒 below. So 𖼀𖽔, 𖼀𖽔𖾐 and 𖼀𖽔𖾑 are three syllables that differ only in tone, and a font that supports the script draws the vowel in the right place. Nasal initials are written with 𖽐 before the consonant (𖽐𖼊𖽔 nta), aspiration with 𖽑 after it (𖼀𖽑𖽔 pha; some languages put it before the consonant), and a glottal stop is the letter 𖽃.

Many consonants come in pairs that differ by a small 'wart', a half-ring fused to the letter, as in 𖼀 pa and 𖼁 ba, 𖼊 ta and 𖼋 da, 𖼞 ka and 𖼟 ga. The wart marks voicing or a softer, less tense sound. In the normalised orthography of Chuxiong the same letters are printed with a dot after them instead of the wart; Unicode treats the two shapes as one character, so which you see depends on the font, not the text.

History: Stone Gateway, 1904, and the legend of the lost book

Samuel Pollard (1864 to 1915), a Cornish Bible Christian missionary, reached Yunnan in 1888 and worked from Zhaotong. In 1904, at the hamlet of Stone Gateway (Shimenkan, 石门坎) in Weining County, Guizhou, he, the Miao men Wang Mingji, John Zhang and James Yang, and the Chinese pastor Stephen Lee worked out the script. Pollard wrote that the idea came from Evans's Cree syllabics; the letter shapes mix Cree, Latin and English shorthand forms with Miao pictographs like those stitched into A-Hmao clothing. An old A-Hmao story said their ancestors once had a book and lost it, and that writing would one day return, and people walked for days to Stone Gateway to learn the new letters. Pollard died of typhoid at Weining in 1915 and is buried in the hills near the mission; the New Testament in his script, revised many times, came out in 1936.

After 1949 the script went through two reforms. In the early 1950s Yang Rongxin and other Miao from Weining tried to replace the four vowel positions with written tone marks and one fixed vowel position; the letters 𖼲 𖼧 𖽒 𖽓 and the tone letters 𖾚 to 𖾟 come from that reform, which the chart now calls archaic because readers did not take it up. In 1957 the government offered a Pinyin-based Latin alphabet, which the A-Hmao mostly ignored. In the 1980s Miao intellectuals in Kunming and Chuxiong refined Yang Rongxin's approach into the Normalised Miao script, given official standing in 1988: vowels stay on the baseline and the small tone letters 𖾓 to 𖾙 follow them. Pollard's original positional system is still what most A-Hmao churches and villages read, so a modern font has to handle both.

The script was proposed for Unicode by John Jenkins in 1997, reached its final proposal from China, Ireland and the UK in 2010, and entered Unicode 6.1 in January 2012 with 133 characters. Adrian Cheuk's 2017 proposal added sixteen more in Unicode 12.0 (2019) for Xiaohua Miao, Gepo, Gan Yi and Nasu: the consonants 𖽅 𖽆 𖽇 𖽈 𖽉 𖽊, the modifier bar 𖽏 and nine vowel signs from 𖽿 to 𖾇.

Reading the grid: archaic letters, reformed marks and the 2019 additions

The consonant rows run in Unicode order, which the proposal based on the order of the Bopomofo (Zhuyin Symbols) used in Chinese schools: labials 𖼀 𖼄 𖼇, dentals 𖼊 𖼐, laterals 𖼖, velars 𖼞 𖼣 𖼦, then the affricates and sibilants 𖼪 𖼳 𖼷 𖼺. Within each family the plain letter comes first, then its warted or 'yi' twin and the aspirated or nasal forms. 𖼆 archaic ma, 𖼓 archaic na, 𖼥 archaic nga and 𖼿 archaic zza are the shapes of Pollard's earliest books, kept so those books can be typed; 𖼃 pla is a Sichuan Hmong letter, and 𖼂 yi pa, 𖼌 yi tta, 𖼠 yi ka and the other 'yi' letters are the forms the Yi languages use for sounds A-Hmao lacks.

The small letters hold more than plain vowels. 𖽕 aa, 𖽧 ii and 𖽮 uu are long or doubled vowels, 𖽗 an, 𖽘 ang, 𖽞 en, 𖽩 ing and 𖽰 ung are nasal finals, 𖽶 and 𖽸 are the rounded r-coloured vowels of Eastern Lisu, and 𖽽 n and 𖽾 ng are syllabic nasals that can carry a syllable with no vowel. Several of these are ligatures of two signs that older printers cast as one piece of type, which is why Unicode encodes 𖽢 ia next to 𖽡 i and 𖽔 a.

The tone group shows the two systems side by side. The four shifters 𖾏 𖾐 𖾑 𖾒 are formatting characters: they show nothing by themselves and only move the vowel before them, so copy them together with a consonant and a vowel. The baseline tone letters 𖾓 to 𖾙 are visible small marks for tones 2 to 8 (tone 1 is unmarked) and belong to the Chuxiong orthography; a syllable uses either a shifter or a tone letter, never both.

How to type the Pollard script: fonts, keyboards and Unicode

Tap any character above to copy it; strings of consonant, vowel and tone mark copy as ordinary text and paste anywhere Unicode goes. The block is Miao, U+16F00 to U+16F9F, in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, so an older app that cannot handle characters above U+FFFF may show two boxes per letter. In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 16F00 Alt+X gives 𖼀.

Font support is the real hurdle: no phone or desktop system ships a Miao font, so most readers see empty boxes until one is installed. Google's free Noto Sans Miao covers the whole block and is the one to install first. SIL's Shimenkan family is built for the individual communities: Shimenkan Guifan for the normalised A-Hmao orthography, Shimenkan MGS, MAS, GSM and Zonghe for Sinicized Miao, Small Flowery Miao, Gepo and Gan Yi, with Sapushan for traditional A-Hmao, Taogu for Eastern Lisu and Salaowu for Nasu. Those fonts also know the language-specific habits: where the aspiration mark goes, whether finals tuck under the consonant, wart or dot.

Keyman has free keyboards for A-Hmao, Lipo, Gepo, Gan Yi and Nasu, and the Miao block picker on keyboard.cool works in a browser. If you are testing a font or a web page, a good check is the proposal's tone example: 𖼣𖽪𖽗 followed by each of the four shifters should show the same vowel cluster in four positions, and 𖼀𖽔𖾓 should show a small tone letter after the vowel, not a box.