Yi syllable Gguop

ꈡ writes the Liangshan Yi syllable gguop. The Yi script is a syllabary: each sign represents a spoken syllable. In Liangshan spelling, the final p marks a low-falling tone—the pitch starts low and falls. The syllable is not a full word, so its translation comes from the surrounding Yi word or sentence.

Yi writing grew through older local traditions; forms varied by place in their glyphs, pronunciations, writing direction, and the signs each tradition used. The earliest reliably dated surviving example is a bronze-bell inscription from 1485; older examples on stone, bronze, pottery, and bone have been reported, but their dates are disputed. Bimo, Yi ritual specialists, maintained traditional forms for religious, magical, medical, and family-history texts.

The standardized Liangshan form was devised in 1974 and officially introduced in 1980 to support literacy. It writes the Liangshan dialect syllable by syllable and has appeared in books, newspapers, official documents, and literature; it is not one standard shared by every Yi community. As of 2019, traditional Yi signs were understood to have developed independently of Chinese characters.