Cypriot Syllable Wi

It represents the syllable conventionally written as wi in Latin letters.

Cypriot signs generally pair a consonant with a vowel. A word was written as a sequence of such syllables, so this sign contributes to a word rather than naming one by itself.

Where does 𐠴 come from?

Its history is part of a longer transition between writing systems.

An early surviving example is a short inscription on a bronze spit from Tomb 49 at the Palaepaphos-Skales burial site, dated to the early Cypriot Geometric I period (1050–950 BCE). The find is discussed as evidence of experimentation between Cypro-Minoan, an earlier undeciphered script used on Cyprus, and the later syllabary. The Cypriot syllabary is also related to Linear B, another ancient syllabic script used for Greek; one-to-one ancestry for each sign has not been established.

How was the Cypriot syllabary used?

It recorded messages on objects, monuments, and public records.

In the first millennium BCE, the script appears on tombs, funerary monuments, inscribed stones, dedications, votive offerings, coins, pottery, and metal.

Many surviving texts record a Greek dialect spoken in Cyprus; at Amathus, the syllabary also wrote Eteo-Cypriot. By the Hellenistic period—the era of Greek kingdoms after Alexander the Great—the Greek alphabet increasingly displaced it in official writing. Inscriptions that use both scripts show them coexisting on Cyprus. Cypriot writing was usually laid out right to left, so mixed-direction text may need an editor that handles both directions.