Yi syllable she

In Nuosu, it is a syllable for “meat.”

Nuosu is a Yi language written with a syllabary, a script whose signs each represent a whole syllable. In Nuosu romanization, this syllable is written she; that Latin-letter spelling is not the English pronoun.

Where did the Yi script come from?

Yi writing developed through local traditions over time.

The tradition’s origin is debated. An inscribed bronze bell dated 1485 is an early secure surviving monumental example; paper manuscripts survive from around 1500.

Bimo, Nuosu ritual specialists, maintained traditional forms for religious, magical, medical, and genealogical texts. The modern Liangshan standard was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980 to support literacy; it drew on older forms used in Northern Yi communities and appeared in textbooks, newspapers, and literature. Other Yi traditions may have different shapes and sound values. The Nuosu word for “meat” has also been compared with meat words in Burmese, Tibetan, Yakkha, and Drung, languages in the same broader family; that is a word relationship, not evidence that the character was borrowed from those scripts.