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.

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]

꜀◌ ꜁◌ ꜂◌ ꜃◌ ◌꜄ ◌꜅ ◌꜆ ◌꜇ 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.