Yi syllable Hlip

It represents a spoken syllable in the Liangshan Yi script.

Some scholars place claimed early Yi artifacts in the Western Han period, including inscriptions on stone, bronze, pottery, and bone. Later evidence includes a Guizhou bronze bell dated 1485 and paper or sheepskin texts from around 1500; these dates describe the wider tradition, not this individual glyph.

Older regional Yi scripts served religious, magical, medical, and genealogical purposes. Bimo, Yi priests and ritual specialists, kept texts in use among villages. A 2024 study of digital Nuosu described literary and artistic work, and teaching and learning the script, rather than ordinary interpersonal or majority-language messaging.

Why does ꆚ look like a Chinese character?

Yi and Han writing are separate traditions, though some forms look similar.

The Unicode description says traditional Yi ideographs appear not to derive from Han (Chinese) characters, despite structural similarities. Some sources call older Yi writing Cuan or Wei; these are names for older Yi traditions, not Chinese-character variants.

The Liangshan standard was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980. It standardized one regional syllabary for literacy without replacing every Yi writing tradition. Readers trained in other Yi traditions may encounter different inventories, glyph forms, and readings, so ꆚ is not automatically interchangeable across them.