Re: Yi script

Acadon wrote:

> Conlangers may find this copy of Yi script
> (minority in China) interesting. Strikes me
> as a bit fantastic. Doubt that it is much
> used.
The Chinese government publishes things in Yi using this script.
Yi is an official language of the PRC.

> The Yi script was originally a logographic
> system;
Very unusually for the environment, the characters were not derived
from Chinese characters.  There were about 8000-10,000 of them.

> but it has been switched, I believe,
> into a syllabary.
A tone-syllabary, devised in the 1970s.  It is now encoded in Unicode, using
one code for each of the 1165 possible tone-syllable combinations.  In the
syllabary itself, the middle-high tone is written using the middle-low tone plus
a diacritic: an inverted breve above.  The glyphs for the other three
tones of a syllable don't look anything alike, though.

There is also a tone-spelling romanization, using final consonants
to write tones: t = high, p = low, x = middle-high, none = middle-low.

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