Yi Syllable Lip

It writes one Liangshan Yi syllable.

The Latin spelling “lip” is the syllable’s romanization; its final p marks a low-falling tone, not a consonant at the end. One syllable can stand for different words, so the surrounding sentence supplies the meaning.

How did Yi writing develop?

Today’s syllabary grew from older, varied Yi writing.

Older Yi writing, known in historical descriptions as Cuan or Wei, was not one uniform script. Local bimo priests—ritual specialists—copied religious, magical, medical, family-lineage, and origin texts; glyphs and writing directions differed by place. Claims of much earlier writing on pottery, stone, bronze, and bone remain debated. The earliest dated surviving example is an inscription on a bronze bell from 1485. One tradition credits Aki with creating the script during the Tang dynasty, but that story does not settle its inventor or beginning.

To expand literacy in the Liangshan dialect, a Latin-alphabet scheme was introduced in 1956. A standard form of the traditional script was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980, reshaping older signs into a syllabary for wider teaching and publishing.

Does ꆺ belong to every Yi tradition?

No; it belongs to the Liangshan standard.

The standardized script writes the Liangshan dialect only; other Yi communities have distinct local varieties and older writing traditions. Their signs, shapes, or writing directions may differ, so this exact form is not a universal stand-in for Yi writing.

Traditional Yi signs imitate the style of Chinese characters, but appear not to descend from the Han characters used to write Chinese. The modern Liangshan syllabary grew from that distinct Yi tradition.