Yi Syllable Shuo

It marks one syllable; context determines which word it represents. This is the standard Yi syllabary for Liangshan Yi, also called Nuosu. A syllabary is a writing system whose signs represent spoken syllables; the same syllable can stand for different words.

Older Yi writing, historically called Cuan or Wei, was ideographic: its signs generally represented words or ideas rather than spoken syllables. One tradition credits a figure named Aki with devising it during the Tang dynasty (618–907); the earliest surviving example is a bronze-bell inscription dated 1485.

Regional Yi writing traditions differed in glyph shapes and writing direction. Village priests passed down local forms used mainly for religious, magical, medical, and genealogical texts. A standardized Liangshan form of the older script was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980 to improve literacy. It writes Liangshan Yi, not every language variety called Yi. The standardized script also has separate radical signs—dictionary lookup marks based on recurring strokes—to find groups of syllables.