Yi Syllable Pup

ꁍ is one syllable written in the Yi script.

Unicode’s capitalized label PUP names the syllable; it is not an English gloss. The standard Nuosu romanization writes it as phu21, with 21 marking tone.

A 2022 Nuosu speech database glosses phu21 as “ancestors”; a 2011 Nuosu syllabary gives “tie up (cow, horse, etc.)” for the same glyph and spelling. The sources disagree, so a bare ꁍ has no safe one-word English translation; the language variety and surrounding words matter.

How old is Yi writing?

Yi writing has a long history; early dates remain disputed.

Some scholars place claimed Yi inscriptions on pottery, stone, and bronze at more than a thousand years old, but that identification is disputed. Dated surviving monuments are from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; paper texts survive from the late Ming period in China. Many manuscripts have no date.

Traditional Yi writing was copied and used by bimo, ritual specialists who maintained religious, medical, and genealogical texts through local lineages. Regional traditions used different graph inventories. The modern Liangshan standard was developed and spread between the 1950s and early 1980s from older Yi forms; historical accounts describe the script as independent of Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and Tai scripts.