Yi syllable yit

It writes the Nuosu Yi syllable romanized as “yit.” Read ꑱ within the surrounding Yi word or sentence; its syllable alone does not provide a complete translation.

The oldest reliably dated surviving evidence of Yi writing is a bronze bell cast in 1485; some scholars argue that stone, pottery, and bronze inscriptions may be older. Local lineages of bimo—Yi ritual specialists—copied traditional forms for religious, magical, medical, genealogical, and literary texts.

The standardized Liangshan form was devised in the 1970s from older northern Yi forms and officially promulgated in 1980. It created a phonetic syllabary for one dialect to support literacy, bringing local variation into a shared standard.

Is ꑱ Chinese, or is it Yi?

It is a Yi-script character used for Nuosu, not Mandarin Chinese. Yi writing developed in southwest China, but its characters write Yi languages rather than Chinese.

Historically, Yi writing varied by locality: traditions differed in their character inventories, shapes, orientation, and reading direction. Older texts carried ritual knowledge, medicine, history, genealogy, and literature. The standardized Liangshan form later appeared in literacy textbooks, village education, newspapers, official documents, and literary works.

Traditional Yi ideographs appear not to derive from Han Chinese characters. “Cuan wen” is a name for historical strands of Yi writing. Yi writing belonged to a wider southwest Chinese writing landscape that also included Naxi, Shui, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Dai, and Burmese traditions; that regional setting alone does not establish an ancestry link to ꑱ.