Arabic Hamza Below

It places the hamza sign beneath a base letter. In Arabic, hamza marks a brief closure in the throat; this combining form is a spelling component, so its role depends on the language and the marks around it.

Arabic writing developed from Nabataean Aramaic, an older Aramaic script, and the hamza sign took shape gradually. Early Qur'anic manuscripts used red dots to mark hamza; the earliest reported use of a recognizably modern hamza sign in Arabic prose is in a Leiden manuscript dated 866 CE.

In Persian and Urdu, hamza marks also write ezafe, a short linking vowel between words; Kashmiri uses a combining hamza mark in its vowel notation. Arabic reading traditions differ in whether the glottal stop is retained.

Is ٕ the same as إ?

No. ٕ is a combining mark; إ is the complete letter. Unicode represents إ canonically as the Arabic letter alif followed by ٕ: the written form is the same, but the character sequence is different. Use إ for ordinary Arabic spelling; ٕ belongs after a base letter when text is deliberately decomposed.

Mark placement can change when Arabic marks are reordered. If hamza below must stay beneath a kasra, the short vowel mark under an Arabic letter, insert U+034F, the combining grapheme joiner (CGJ), between the kasra and ٕ.