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.

Block

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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

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

See also

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References

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  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.