Modifier Tone Letters Explained

Rangestart:A700
Rangeend:A71F
Script1:Common
Symbols:Tone marks
4 1:23
5 0:4
5 1:5
Note:[1] [2]

Modifier Tone Letters is a Unicode block containing tone markings for Chinese, Chinantec, Africanist, and other phonetic transcriptions. It does not contain the standard IPA tone marks, which are found in Spacing Modifier Letters.

(IPA|꜀◌ ꜁◌ ꜂◌ ꜃◌ ◌꜄ ◌꜅ ◌꜆ ◌꜇) are used to mark yin and (underlined) yang splits of the ping, shang, qu and ru tones, respectively, in the etymological four-tone analysis of Chinese. The dotted tone letters (IPA|꜈ ꜉ ꜊ ꜋ ꜌) are used for the pitch of neutral tones, while the reversed tone letters (IPA|꜒ ꜓ ꜔ ꜕ ꜖) and neutral (IPA|꜍ ꜎ ꜏ ꜐ ꜑) are used for tone sandhi. (IPA|◌ꜗ ◌ꜘ ◌ꜙ ◌ꜚ) are used in Ozumacín Chinantec. (IPA|ꜛ ꜜ) are the IPA diacritics for upstep and downstep, while (IPA|ꜝ ꜞ ꜟ) are substitutes people used before broad font support of the IPA, and still preferred by some.

Block

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Modifier Tone Letters block:

See also

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Unicode character database. The Unicode Standard. 2023-07-26.
  2. Web site: Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard. The Unicode Standard. 2023-07-26.