Yi syllable tox

It identifies a Yi syllable, not a full translation. The spelling tox is Yi Pinyin: a Latin-letter way to write the syllable. In the standardized Liangshan Nuosu system, its final x marks the secondary-high tone, a pitch pattern. The surrounding Yi word or sentence supplies the meaning.

Why does Yi script history have more than one track?

Regional Yi writing traditions came before the modern Liangshan standard.

A University of Washington overview records claims of inscriptions from China's Western Han dynasty and later manuscript traditions. Unicode's conservative account cites a surviving bronze bell dated 1485 as the earliest surviving example. Traditional forms were used by village bimo—Yi ritual specialists—for religious, magical, medical, and genealogical texts.

The modern Liangshan standard was devised in 1974 and promulgated in 1980 to support literacy. It selected older forms for the Liangshan Nuosu dialect, so it does not represent every Yi writing tradition. Traditional Yi ideographs appear not to derive from Han writing.