Yi syllable rrup

In JavaScript or Python, use \uA38B.

ꎋ is the Yi syllable rrup in standardized Liangshan Yi writing, also known as Nuosu. In Liangshan romanization, final p marks a low-falling tone rather than a final p sound. A dictionary gives a pronunciation close to “joo,” said low and falling ([dʐu²¹]).

Yi writing has a layered history. Some scholars place purported inscriptions as early as the Western Han period (206 BC–AD 9), while the earliest surviving dated example in the Unicode account is a bronze bell from 1485. Paper texts date to around 1500. Traditional writing served religious, magical, medical, genealogical, and formal purposes, often passed on by bimo, Yi ritual specialists. The modern Liangshan standard was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980.

Why can ꎋ look different?

A font’s Yi glyph design determines its shape.

Traditional Yi writing has local repertoires, glyph shapes, orientations, and writing directions, so an older or regional form is not just a font variant of this standardized Liangshan character. In the standardized syllabary, characters do not combine typographically; a written string is a sequence of syllable signs.

The Unicode 12.1 account describes Yi writing as unrelated to Han ideographs and to neighboring Tibetan, Burmese, and Tai alphabets. Naxi pictographs, Shui writing, and ancient Bashu pictographs are other southwest-China traditions; sharing a region does not itself make them ancestors of ꎋ.