Yi Syllables

Syllables

• the initial consonants are noted with basic Latin consonants if possible, or distinctive consonant digrams rather than with extended consonants ;
• the final vowels are noted with basic Latin vowels if possible, or distinctive vowel digrams rather than with extended vowels ; the vowel length is not noted but is implied for compound vowels; the actual phonetic vowel may be very different depending on the initial consonant; some vowels are noted using a digram with a final 'r';
• tones are noted after the final vowel by appending a 't' for the high tone, 'x' for the raising tone, 'p' for the low tone, or their absence for the default mid tone ; various Yi dialects spoken in China may use more than 4 tones for some syllables, but they are usually not semantically distinctive and unified using one of the 4 standardized tones. Another "Hani Pinyin" notation are noting tones with a trailing 'F', 'O', 'Q' or 'L', instead of 't', 'x' or 'p' in Yi Pinyin: this alternate Hani Pinyin system also represents consonants and vowels with different single letters or digrams, but can distinguish more phonemic syllables than those unified in the current version of the modern Yi syllabary.
• Characters for the high tone are generally very different from those used for the low tone, frequently based on a different radical. On the opposite, characters for the raising tone show an additional arc diacritic above the base character used for the similar syllable with the default mid tone, or above the character for the similar syllable with the low tone in 3 cases where there's no character for the mid tone in the standard syllabary.

History