What ꏬ means
ꏬ is a Nuosu syllable glossed “eagle.” Its romanized form is jot, pronounced roughly “cho” (the ch in “church” plus oh) on a high, steady pitch. Yi writing uses characters for spoken syllables, so ꏬ can be a word by itself or one part of a longer word. Outside Yi-language text, it has no standard chat meaning.
Different Yi writing traditions used different forms and readings. The modern Liangshan standard was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980; those dates mark standardization, not the beginning of Yi writing.
How did Yi writing begin?
Yi writing has no single settled starting date. The earliest surviving dated evidence is a bronze bell from 1485. Many Yi manuscripts are undated and may be older, so the bell marks surviving evidence, not the script’s invention.
Bimo, Yi ritual specialists, used Yi writing for religious, magical, and medical texts. Yi writing traditions extend across Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou. Cuan wen is a historical label associated with earlier or local Yi writing traditions.
In Yi writing, ꏬ is ordinary orthography; away from that context, it reads as a script or font sample.
A lone ꏬ does not reliably mean “eagle” outside Yi-language context.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsDon't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
2Why does ꏬ look like a box?
A box means the active font lacks Yi coverage. Switch to a font that supports Yi; the underlying text character is unchanged.
How is Yi jot pronounced?
Roughly “cho” (the ch in “church” plus oh), spoken on a high, steady pitch. In jot, the final t marks the high tone; it is not pronounced like the English letter t.
How to type ꏬ
ꏬ\A3ECCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.