Modifier Tone Letters

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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
4.1 (2005)23 (+23)
5.0 (2006)27 (+4)
5.1 (2008)32 (+5)
Unicode documentation
Code chart ∣ Web page
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[edit]

Modifier Tone Letters[1]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
U+A70x
U+A71x
Notes
1.^ As of Unicode version 15.1

History[edit]

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

Version Final code points[a] 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), "Supplemental set of IPA combing marks, modifier letters, and five-degree contour tone marks (A.7)", 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), "7.2.8", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 47, Sophia Antipolis, France; 2005-09-12/15
N3103 (pdf, doc) Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2006-08-25), "M48.1", 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[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  2. ^ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.