Combining Conjoining Macron

It extends one overline across several Coptic letters. FE26 is the middle extender: ︤ opens the run, FE26 follows each intervening letter, and ︥ closes it. One ordinary combining macron cannot join that multi-letter span.

Its historical ancestor is the Coptic supralinear stroke, a line above letters. A Fayyūmic Coptic manuscript witness is plausibly from the sixth or seventh century; its tilde-shaped stroke marks abbreviations for sacred names and numbers, and can stand for the Coptic letter ⲛ, which represents an n sound, at a line’s end.

Why does this macron need left and right halves?

The three-part sequence lets a font connect one line over several letters. ︤ starts a Coptic run, ︦ follows each intermediate letter, and ︥ closes it. Without contextual glyph substitution and positioning, a font may detach or misplace the line; that is a display problem, not a different reading.

An encoding proposal for Church Slavonic, a historical Slavic liturgical language, also places ︦ between the halves of a titlo, its overline mark. This is a separate writing convention from Coptic.

How do I type the middle piece in a Coptic overline?

Use a Coptic layout or enter the mark with Unicode input. On the Antinoou Coptic-English keyboard for Mac, Shift+; enters ︦; < and > enter the opening and closing halves. For three letters, type the first letter, ︤, the middle letter, ︦, the final letter, and ︥.

Use the ordinary combining macron for one letter. Manuscript transcriptions preserve the source’s stroke pattern: the same word can have a binding stroke between letters in one manuscript and a single-letter stroke in another.