What ꌱ means
It adds a syllable; the Yi word gives meaning. Nuosu spells it ssat in Latin letters; pronounce it roughly “za,” with voiced z and a high, level pitch.
Yi writing grew through regional traditions. Bimo, Yi ritual specialists, used local forms for religious, magical, medical, and family-history texts. The Liangshan standard, devised in 1974 and promulgated in 1980, adapted selected forms into a syllabary—one sign per spoken syllable—to expand literacy.
The oldest reliably dated example is a 1485 inscription on a Chenghua bell; earlier origins remain debated. ꌱ comes from Yi writing, not Han Chinese writing, and the Liangshan standard is one regional tradition.
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Who writes ꌱ
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Questions people ask
1Why does ꌱ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
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How to type or find ꌱ
- Also called
- ssat · za55
- Search it as
- Nuosu · Liangshan · Yi Pinyin · Yi script
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ꌱ\A331ssat in a Yi Pinyin input method (a Latin-letter lookup) to select the matching Yi syllable.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.