Yi syllable yi

A Liangshan vocabulary glosses ꑳ as “house” when it stands alone. In Nuosu, it represents a syllable written yi in the standard Latin spelling. The sound is roughly a soft, voiced “zh” followed by “ee,” spoken on a level tone; in a longer word, ꑳ contributes one syllable rather than the whole word’s meaning.

Older Yi writing had several regional traditions, each with its own glyph shapes and inventories. Bimo (Yi ritual specialists) copied and taught texts within lineages for religious, medical, genealogical, and other purposes. Some scholars identify inscriptions on pottery, stone, and bronze from well more than one thousand years ago as Yi writing; that identification is debated. Unicode identifies a bronze-bell inscription from 1485 as the earliest surviving monumental example. The standardized Liangshan form for Nuosu was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980. It adapted older regional writing for this variety, not for every Yi language.

Is ꑳ Chinese or Yi?

ꑳ is a Yi syllable, not a Chinese Han character. Older Yi writing took inspiration from Chinese characters, but its glyphs do not appear to descend from the Han character tradition. In the modern Liangshan syllabary, each sign represents a spoken syllable.