What ꋀ means
It is one syllable in Liangshan Yi writing.
“cop” is its Latin-letter reading, not the English word for a police officer. Here “c” sounds like “ts” with a puff of air, “o” like a close “o,” and final “p” marks a low falling tone.
How did Yi writing change?
The Liangshan standard builds on older Yi writing.
Traditional Yi writing, also called Cuan or Wei, varied locally; priests used it for ritual, healing, magic, genealogies, and origin texts. One origin story credits Aki with creating it during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Claims of inscriptions from the Western Han period are disputed; a bronze bell dated 1485 bears the oldest surviving Yi inscription.
The Latin-letter scheme appeared in 1956; the Liangshan syllabary was devised in 1974 and promulgated in 1980 for one Yi variety.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ꋀ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type ꋀ
ꋀ\A2C0Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.