Modifier Tone Letters
# Modifier Tone Letters

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

Modifier Tone Letters 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 | ꜐ | ꜑ | ꜒ | ꜓ | ꜔ | ꜕ | ꜖ | ꜗ | ꜘ | ꜙ | ꜚ | ꜛ | ꜜ | ꜝ | ꜞ | ꜟ |
| Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 15.0 |||||||||||||||||

## 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 | 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 |
| 4.1 | U+A700..A716 | 23 | 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 |
| 4.1 | U+A700..A716 | 23 | L2/03-372 | N2673 | Anderson, Deborah (2003-10-22), Comments on N2626, "Proposal on IPA Extensions & Combining Diacritic Marks for ISO 10646 in BMP" |
| 4.1 | U+A700..A716 | 23 | 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 |
| 4.1 | U+A700..A716 | 23 | 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 |
| 5.0 | U+A717..A71A | 4 | L2/04-349 | | Priest, Lorna (2004-08-27), Proposal to Encode Chinantec Tone Marks and Orthographic 'at' Characters |
| 5.0 | U+A717..A71A | 4 | 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 |
| 5.1 | U+A71B..A71F | 5 | | 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 |
| 5.1 | U+A71B..A71F | 5 | | 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 |
| ↑ Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names ||||||
