What ̮ means
Its job changes with the notation. Hittite texts were written in cuneiform, an ancient wedge-shaped writing system; scholars render their sounds with Latin letters, and ḫ is conventionally written ḫ. In UPA, the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, a̮ marks a central vowel: one made with the tongue near the middle of the mouth.
A Unicode proposal dated 2002 cites UPA examples from 1901, but those examples do not date the first use of this mark.
How do I keep the mark attached to the letter?
Enter the base first, then this mark. In ḫ, the letter h comes first and the breve below follows. In source code, append the escape \u032E after the base if your programming language supports Unicode escapes.
By itself, the mark may appear with a dotted circle as a specimen or remain unattached; the circle is not part of the sequence. The font positions it relative to the base, so placement can vary. Unicode uses ʎ̮ as an example of a breve below a tall letter.
A specialist transcription mark whose role depends on the notation; it does not signal a mood.
Alone, it has no base; read the letter and notation together.
Part of the collection
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsThis scholarly Hittite spelling is conventionally written with the single letter ḫ.
Don't confuse it with
2The arch sits above the dotted-circle specimen; this mark sits below its base. Their positions can signal different jobs, so do not substitute one for the other.
This arch is inverted. In IPA it marks a nonsyllabic vowel, while the below breve's role depends on its notation system.
Related characters
2
ḫ.
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
3Why does it show a dotted circle by itself?
A dotted circle can stand in for a missing base in a specimen; it is not part of the mark. In ordinary text, the base letter comes first.
Is the breve below the same as the one above?
No. The breve above is a separate mark, and notation systems can assign it a different job.
Why does my font put this mark in a strange place?
It can. Fonts position the mark relative to the base, and their measurements differ; crowded marks may float, collide, or stack.
More like this
9
How to type or find ̮
- Search it as
- breve below · h breve below · ḫ · ḫ · central vowel breve · UPA breve · IPA breve below · 032e
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
̮\032ECodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.