Yi syllable Nru

It writes the mid-level Nuosu syllable nru. Nuosu is a Yi language. The Latin-letter spelling nru is a guide, not an English word. Its pronunciation is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as [ndʐu³³]: start with n, move into a voiced d-to-zh sound with the tongue drawn back, then finish with u. The superscript ³³ marks a steady mid pitch.

Yi script history spans many local forms rather than one inventor. Some of the earliest securely dated surviving examples are inscriptions; one on a bronze bell dates to 1485. Bimo, Yi religious specialists, used the writing for religious, magical, medical, and family-history texts. It was not chiefly a shared everyday writing system across Yi communities.

A literacy project in the 1970s shaped the Liangshan standard, selecting a smaller set of traditional signs and assigning modern sound values to them. The standard was officially promulgated in 1980. It developed within Yi writing rather than adapting Han characters (Chinese characters); the Unicode Yi syllable set represents this Liangshan standard, not every older local form.