Yi script

Languages written with the classical script included Nuosu, Nisu, Wusa Nasu, and Mantsi.

It was traditionally written on manuscripts vertically from top to bottom (see the gallery below), in columns stacking from right to left, but some modern transcriptions are showing it horizontally from left to right (glyphs are then rotated 90 degrees anticlockwise, in opposition to what is done for modern usage of Chinese ideographic characters that preserve their orientation), in lines stacking from top to bottom.

Yunnan did not officially adopt the Liangshan script, but developed its own Yunnan Standard Yi Script (云南规范彝文方案 Yúnnán Guīfàn Yíwén Fāng'àn) on different principles, which emphasized cross-dialect intelligibility, as well as retention of shared logographic forms.

Guizhou published a dictionary in 1991 which identified standard and variant forms of traditional Yi logographs used in Nasu area.

The syllabary may be used as well for other Lolo languages elsewhere in China, notably for the Hani (Southern Yi) dialect spoken in Yunnan Province, where it is used on some public displays (along with romanizations or Han transcriptions), but their Pinyin romanization uses a different system, based on Chinese Pinyin, which may offer additional phonetic distinctions that are still not representable in the standard Yi syllabary.

All IPA transcriptions may vary with sources and authors, depending on dialects or when representing local accents more precisely than the simplified phonology.

Other tones are represented in Sichuan Yi Pinyin by appending a basic Latin consonant, and transcribed in IPA by appending modifier digits or IPA tone symbols, or by adding an accent diacritic above the base vowel symbol: The syllabary of standard modern Yi is illustrated in the two tables below.

The consonant sound represented in each column comes first before the vowel and tone sound represented in each row; the top-right cell (highlighted with a pink background in the table below) shows the additional syllable iteration mark (in standard Sichuan Yi Pinyin, it is romanized as 'w', but its actual phonetic value is variable and comes directly from the syllable written just before it).

[11] Classical Yi – which is an ideographic script like the Chinese characters, but with a very different origin – has not yet been encoded in Unicode, but a proposal to encode 88,613 Classical Yi characters was made in 2007 (including many variants for specific regional dialects or historical evolutions.

Trilingual signs, in Chinese (ideographic script), Yi (syllabic script), and Hani (alphabetic Han Pinyin romanization) on the Lihaozhai Township government office. Jianshui County , Yunnan. The Yi and Hani texts apparently have a syllable-to-syllable correspondence to the Chinese text. The standard Sichuan Yi Pinyin transcription is not used here because these signs are displayed in a province where the Nuosu (Northern Yi) language is not natively spoken. The displayed transcription with the modern Yi syllabic script (which is a huge simplification of the Classical Yi logosyllabic script which was used before the 1980s but with many non standardized variants) is less precise than the modern Hani Pinyin romanization.