Yi Syllable Kex

No single English translation fits. Liangshan romanization's final x marks the secondary-high tone—a pitch pattern—not a consonant. Yi syllables can represent different words; context supplies the reading. Claims of Han-period and early-third-century Yi inscriptions remain disputed; a fifteenth-century bell is the oldest reliably dated example. Bimo, Yi ritual specialists, used traditional Yi manuscripts for religious, magical, medical, and historical texts. The Liangshan phonetic standard, linked to Classical Yi, the older Yi writing tradition, was devised in 1974 and promulgated in 1980 for one dialect.