Yi syllable ngep

It writes the Liangshan Yi syllable romanized as ngep. The Liangshan standard is used for Nuosu, a Yi language. The final p in this Latin-letter spelling marks a low-falling tone; it is not an extra final p sound.

By itself, ꉭ has no fixed translation. The surrounding word or sentence supplies its meaning, so a lone ꉭ does not tell you which English word to use.

Where did the Yi script come from?

Its beginnings are debated; the script has a long record. Early reported examples include inscriptions on stone, bronze, pottery, and bone from the Western Han period (206 BC to AD 9). A partial inscription is dated AD 223–37, and later stone inscriptions reach the thirteenth century. Surviving manuscripts are dated around 1500, while some overviews use fifteenth-century evidence as the firmer starting point.

Classical Yi was used by bimo, Yi ritual specialists, for ritual and specialist manuscripts. The modern Liangshan standard drew on Classical Yi forms; it was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980 for the Liangshan dialect. It broadened literacy in that region, not one shared standard for every Yi language. Older or other regional forms do not automatically correspond one-to-one to ꉭ.