Khamti hm sign

The tone mark selects the reading of this Khamti logogram. With the right tone, ꩶ can join a negative construction, mark a response to a question, or mean “there.” The mark is part of the reading, not decoration.

Older Khamti writing survives chiefly in handwritten scrolls about law, religion, and culture. The writing tradition connects with Shan and related Tai systems, including Aiton, Phake, Ahom, and Khamyang. A revised orthography developed in 2005-06; its extension proposal entered Unicode review in 2008.

These logograms are documented for transcribing speech rather than formal writing. The revision aimed to make Khamti easier to read, teach, and use on computers while retaining its writing tradition.

Is ꩶ a Burmese letter?

No: ꩶ is a Khamti logogram written with Myanmar-script conventions.

The 2008 Unicode proposal harmonized overlapping Khamti shapes with Myanmar-script forms and described the dots in local Khamti styles as stylistic. A font may therefore draw ꩶ differently without changing the character.

Older spelling did not mark tone; the revised system lets these logograms carry tone and makes their readings more explicit. Khamti Shan in Myanmar and Tai Khamti in Northeast India had separate orthography and literature projects by 2017, so a spelling convention from one is not automatically shared by the other.