Yi Syllable Fox

It writes one syllable in the Liangshan Yi script.

The standard is used for the Liangshan dialect, spoken by Nuosu people. “Fox” comes from a Latin-letter system for writing Yi sounds; by itself, ꃕ supplies a syllable, not a whole word meaning.

How did this Yi character develop?

Its history includes older regional forms and a later standard.

One Nuosu origin tradition credits the sage Aki with devising the script during the Tang dynasty. Claims of Western Han-period inscriptions exist, but that date is unsettled. The oldest surviving example identified for traditional Yi writing is an inscription on a bronze bell dated 1485; manuscripts around 1500 also survive. Traditional Yi writing, historically called Cuan or Wei, was ideographic: its signs represented ideas or words. Its local forms varied in shape, repertoire, and writing direction.

Traditional Yi writing was used mainly by bimo, local ritual priests, for religious, magical, medical, and genealogical texts. To improve literacy, a Latin-letter romanization for Liangshan Yi was introduced in 1956, and a standardized Liangshan syllabary was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980. This standard writes the Liangshan dialect spoken by Nuosu people, not every language grouped under Yi. ꃕ belongs to that standardized syllabary, not an alternate local spelling from Cuan or Wei.

Why does the name say fox?

It is the romanized spelling of the syllable.

The Liangshan romanization uses Latin letters and marks tone at the end of a spelling: final t is high-level, p low-falling, and x secondary-high; no final t, p, or x marks midlevel tone. Since “fox” ends in x, the name records secondary-high tone.