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Module 1 · Sound & Script — the eight tones
Iu Mien is a tone language: the melody of a syllable changes its meaning. The Unified Script (1984) writes each tone with a silent letter at the end of the word. Tap a card to see the pitch shape.
Tone descriptions follow Arisawa (2016), building on Purnell and Court. Example words are seed data pending community review.
Consonants
The script follows Pinyin logic: b d j g are crisp unaspirated sounds, and true voiced stops are written mb nd nj nq.
Vowels
Doubled vowels (aa) are long. ae, er, or are single sounds, not English letter pairs.
Check yourself
Coming modules and resources
Modules
Module 2: Greetings & first phrases · Module 3: Nouns and classifiers · Module 4: Verbs · Module 5: The sentence as a journey (topic first, focus last). Each will follow the age-group framing above.
Resources
- PDF of the book An Iu Mien Pedagogical Grammar and Cultural Reader
- Oral History Project
- A curated cultural and linguistic archive
- A community platform for sharing and posting