Modifier Tone Letters

From HandWiki
Short description: Unicode character block
Modifier Tone Letters
RangeU+A700..U+A71F
(32 code points)
PlaneBMP
ScriptsCommon
Symbol setsTone marks
Assigned32 code points
Unused0 reserved code points
Unicode version history
4.123 (+23)
5.027 (+4)
5.132 (+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.

꜀◌ ꜁◌ ꜂◌ ꜃◌ ◌꜄ ◌꜅ ◌꜆ ◌꜇⟩ 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 ⟨꜈ ꜉ ꜊ ꜋ ꜌⟩ are used for the pitch of neutral tones, while the reversed tone letters ⟨꜒ ꜓ ꜔ ꜕ ꜖⟩ and neutral ⟨꜍ ꜎ ꜏ ꜐ ꜑⟩ are used for tone sandhi. ⟨◌ꜗ ◌ꜘ ◌ꜙ ◌ꜚ⟩ are used in Ozumacín Chinantec. ⟨ꜛ ꜜ⟩ are the IPA diacritics for upstep and downstep, while ⟨ꜝ ꜞ ꜟ⟩ are substitutes people used before broad font support of the IPA, and still preferred by some. ⟨ꜛ ꜜ ꜝ ꜞ ꜟ⟩ can also be used for superscript modifiers.

Block

History

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

Version Final code points[lower-alpha 1] Count L2 ID WG2 ID Document
4.1 U+A700..A716 23 L2/03-317 N2626 Proposal on IPA Extensions & Combining Diacritical Marks for ISO/IEC 10646 in BMP, 2003-09-27 
L2/03-339 N2646 Constable, Peter (2003-10-08), Comments on N2626, Proposal on IPA Extensions and Combining Diacritic Marks for ISO/IEC 10646 in BMP 
L2/03-372 N2673 Anderson, Deborah (2003-10-22), Comments on N2626, "Proposal on IPA Extensions & Combining Diacritic Marks for ISO 10646 in BMP" 
L2/04-107 N2713 Revised Proposal for encoding A Supplemented Set of IPA Combining Marks, Modifier Letters & Five-Degree Contour Tone Marks, 2004-03-20 
L2/04-156R2 Moore, Lisa (2004-08-13), UTC #99 Minutes 
5.0 U+A717..A71A 4 L2/04-246R Priest, Lorna (2004-07-26), Revised Proposal for Additional Latin Phonetic and Orthographic Characters 
L2/04-349 Priest, Lorna (2004-08-27), Proposal to Encode Chinantec Tone Marks and Orthographic 'at' Characters 
L2/04-349R N2883 Priest, Lorna (2004-12-09), Proposal to Encode Chinantec Tone Marks 
5.1 U+A71B..A71F 5 N2945 Priest, Lorna; Constable, Peter (2005-08-09), Proposal to Encode Additional Latin Phonetic and Orthographic Characters 
N2953 (pdf, doc) Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2006-02-16), Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 47, Sophia Antipolis, France; 2005-09-12/15 
N3103 (pdf, doc) Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2006-08-25), Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 48, Mountain View, CA, USA; 2006-04-24/27 
  1. Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names

See also

References