What ꆏ means
It marks the person addressed. Documented Liangshan phrases place ꆏ before questions or phrases built around a verb.
How old is Yi writing?
A bronze bell dated 1485 is among the earliest surviving Yi monuments. Earlier proposed objects from Guizhou have disputed dates. Traditional Yi texts were copied mainly by bimo priests—ritual specialists—for religious, magical, and medical use. The modern Liangshan Yi standard was devised in 1974 and issued in 1980 from regional forms that vary in shape, direction, signs, and reading. Readers of other Yi traditions may not use ꆏ with this Nuosu value. Those dates mark standardization, not the beginning of Yi writing. Yi writing has its own structure, separate from Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and Tai scripts.
Don't confuse it with
4Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does ꆏ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type ꆏ
ꆏ\A18FCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.