What ꑝ means
A written syllable, not a whole word.
In Liangshan Yi's Latin-letter spelling, xit's final t marks high-level tone; its word meaning comes from context.
Which Yi writing does ꑝ belong to?
It belongs to standardized Liangshan Yi, called Nuosu.
Traditional Yi writing varied by region and lineage. Bimo, ritual specialists, taught students from hand-copied texts on religion, magic, medicine, family history and literature. Paper texts survive from at least the late Ming; earliest claims cite a Western Han bronze and a Shu Han stone inscription.
Traditional signs imitated Chinese characters; the standardized syllabary grew from that writing. Latin-letter spelling began in 1956; Liangshan's standard was devised in 1974, promulgated in 1980, and serves Nuosu, not every Yi variety.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ꑝ 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.
How to type ꑝ
ꑝ\A45DCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.