The Yi script is an umbrella term for two scripts used to write the Yi languages; Classical Yi, and the later Yi Syllabary. The script is also historically known in Chinese as Cuan Wen or Wei Shu and various other names, among them "tadpole writing". This is to be distinguished from romanized Yi which was a system invented by missionaries and intermittently used afterwards by some government institutions. There was also a Yi abugida or alphasyllabary devised by Sam Pollard, the Pollard script for the Miao language, which he adapted into "Nasu" as well. Present day traditional Yi writing can be sub-divided into five main varieties ; Nuosu, Nasu, Nisu, Sani and Azhe.
Classical Yi
Classical Yi is a syllabic logographic system that was reputedly devised during the Tang dynasty by someone called Aki. However, the earliest surviving examples of the Yi script only date back to the late 15th century and early 16th century, the earliest dated example being an inscription on a bronze bell dated to 1485. There are tens of thousands of manuscripts in the Yi script, dating back several centuries, although most are undated. In recent years a number of Yi manuscript texts written in traditional Yi script have been published. The original script is said to have comprised 1,840 characters, but over the centuries widely divergent glyph forms have developed in different Yi-speaking areas, an extreme example being the character for "stomach" which exists in some forty glyph variants. Due to this regional variation as many as 90,000 different Yi glyphs are known from manuscripts and inscriptions. Although similar to Chinese in function, the glyphs are independent in form, with little to suggest that they are directly related. However, there are some borrowings from Chinese, such as the characters for numbers used in some Yi script traditions. Languages written with the classical script included Nuosu, Nisu, Wusa Nasu, and Mantsi.
Modern Yi
The Modern Yi script is a standardized syllabary derived from the classic script in 1974 by the localChinese government. In 1980 it was made the official script of the Liangshan dialect of the Nuosu Yi language of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, and consequently is known as Liangshan Standard Yi Script. Other dialects of Yi do not yet have a standardized script. There are 756 basic glyphs based on the Liangshan dialect, plus 63 for syllables only used for words borrowed from Chinese. The native syllabary represents vowel and consonant-vowel syllables, formed of 43 consonants and 8 vowels that can occur with any of three tones, plus two "buzzing" vowels that can only occur as mid tone. Not all combinations are possible. Although the Liangshan dialect has four tones, only three tones have separate glyphs. The fourth tone may sometimes occur as a grammatical inflection of the mid tone, so it is written with the mid-tone glyph plus a diacritic mark. Counting syllables with this diacritic, the script represents 1,164 syllables. In addition there is a syllable iteration mark, ꀕ that is used to reduplicate a preceding syllable.
Syllabary
The syllabary of standard modern Yi is illustrated in the table below. The sound represented by the column comes first. :
The consonant series are tenuis stop, aspirate, voiced, prenasalized, voiceless nasal, voiced nasal, voiceless fricative, voiced fricative, respectively. In addition, hl, l are laterals, and hx is. V, w, ss, r, y are the voiced fricatives. With stops and affricates, voicing is shown by doubling the letter.
Plosive series
Affricate series
Vowels
Tones
An unmarked syllable has mid level tone, e.g. . Other tones are shown by a final letter:
The Unicode block for Modern Yi is Yi syllables, and comprises 1,164 syllables and one syllable iteration mark. In addition, a set of 55 radicals for use in dictionary classification are encoded at U+A490 to U+A4C6. Yi syllables and Yi radicals were added as new blocks to Unicode Standard with version 3.0. Classical Yi - which is an ideographic script like the Chinese characters - has not yet been encoded in Unicode, but a proposal to encode 88,613 Classical Yi characters was made in 2007.
