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.
(IPA|꜀◌ ꜁◌ ꜂◌ ꜃◌ ◌꜄ ◌꜅ ◌꜆ ◌꜇) 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 (IPA|꜈ ꜉ ꜊ ꜋ ꜌) are used for the pitch of neutral tones, while the reversed tone letters (IPA|꜒ ꜓ ꜔ ꜕ ꜖) and neutral (IPA|꜍ ꜎ ꜏ ꜐ ꜑) are used for tone sandhi. (IPA| ꜗ ꜘ ꜙ ꜚ ) are modifier letters used in Ozumacín Chinantec. (IPA|ꜛ ꜜ) are the IPA modifier letters for upstep and downstep, while (IPA|ꜝ ꜞ ꜟ) are substitutes people used before broad font support of the IPA, and still preferred by some.
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Modifier Tone Letters block:
| Count | L2 ID | WG2 ID | Document | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | U+A700..A716 | 23 | N2626 | |||
| N2646 | ||||||
| N2673 | ||||||
| N2713 | ||||||
| 5.0 | U+A717..A71A | 4 | ||||
| N2883 | ||||||
| 5.1 | U+A71B..A71F | 5 | N2945 | |||
| doc) | ||||||
| doc) | ||||||