Tai Le script


The Tai Le script, or Dehong Dai script, is a script used to write the Tai Nüa language spoken by the Tai Nua people of south-central Yunnan, China. It is written in horizontal lines from left to right, with spaces only between clauses and sentences.
The Tai Le script has a long history and has used several different orthographic conventions. Between 1952 and 1988, the script went through four reforms. The third reform used diacritics to represent tones, while the fourth reform uses standalone tone letters.

Letters

In modern Tai Le orthographies, initial consonants precede vowels, vowels precede final consonants and tone marks, if present, follow the entire syllable. Consonants have an inherent vowel /a/, unless followed by a dependent vowel sign. When vowels occur initially in a word or syllable, they are preceded by the vowel carrier ᥟ.
Note that old orthography tone diacritics combine with short letters but appear to the right of tall letters.

Unicode

The Tai Le script was added to the Unicode Standard in April 2003 with the release of version 4.0.
The Unicode block for Tai Le is U+1950-U+197F:
The tone diacritics used in the old orthography are located in the Combining Diacritical Marks Unicode block:
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