Yi Syllable Njix

It writes the Liangshan Yi syllable romanized as njix. Liangshan Yi is also called Nuosu. In the standard Latin-letter spelling, the final x marks a tone called secondary high. The character represents one speech syllable; Yi vocabulary and surrounding text give it a fuller reading.

Traditional Yi writing, historically called Cuan or Wei, had many local forms. It used ideographs—signs for words or ideas—rather than assigning one glyph to each spoken syllable. One origin tradition credits a figure named Aki with devising the script during the Tang dynasty. These older Yi signs appear not to derive from Chinese Han characters.

Village priests passed local forms down in religious, magical, medical, and genealogical texts. The earliest surviving dated example is an inscription on a bronze bell from 1485. A standard form for Liangshan Yi was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980 to improve literacy. It reshaped older writing into a syllabary, where each character represents a spoken syllable, and was not intended for every Yi variety.

Why does ꐲ appear as a box?

A missing Yi glyph usually appears as a box. A Yi font that supports this character can draw it; a font without it may show a box or replacement mark. The text still holds the Yi syllable even when the screen cannot display its glyph.