Yi Syllables

The Sichuan Yi Pinyin romanization shown below is simplified using only basic Latin letters, and pronunciations are accurate for the major Liangshan dialect of the Nuosu (Northern Yi) language spoken in the Sichuan Province, where the syllabary was first standardized in 1974, based on its dominant Liangshan dialect spoken in that province and for which an extensive dictionary was developed and published in 1980: Note that the name for U+A015 is a misnomer, as the character is actually a syllable iteration mark corresponding to "w" in standard Yi romanization.

[3] This error was not detected in the early phases of discussions for encoding the script and during the review even by Chinese members, because the character was not part of published syllabary charts but found only within some texts; the Pinyin romanization 'wu' was found only when citing the sign isolately, but in Mandarin reading, the Pinyin 'wu' is just reads as a long 'u', which would be confusive with the distinct Yi syllable encoded for 'u' alone, keeping the 'w' silent as a null consonant, so its Yi Pinyin romanization is written as 'w' only).

As the character names already standardized in the UCS encoding is a character property that is subject to the Unicode Standard Stability Policy and that cannot be changed, a clarifying annotation was added into the lists of name aliases of the Unicode character database and in the published character charts.

[4] With this clarification, the general category property for this character was also changed from 'Lo' (other letter, used by all other Yi syllabic letters) to 'Lm' (as a letter modifier) and given an additional "Extender" property (like U+3005 IDEOGRAPHIC ITERATION MARK): these properties are not normative but are documenting for the best known practices about character behaviors and usages.

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Yi Syllables block: