What ꣰ means
It marks vinata, a named melodic figure in Sāmaveda chant. Sāmagāna is the sung tradition of the Sāmaveda, a Vedic text; its notation uses signs to record features of the chant's music.
A Devanagari Sāmaveda manuscript is catalogued to 1568/69; that dates the manuscript, not ꣰ itself. A 2007 Unicode proposal gathered this and related Sāmavedic marks for digital encoding, and ꣰ entered Unicode in 2009.
Is ꣰ the ordinary syllable `वि`?
No; ꣰ is a chant mark, while वि spells the syllable vi. The ordinary syllable is formed from व plus the vowel sign ि; ꣰ is a single Vedic diacritic, not that letter-and-vowel sequence.
In digital text, ꣰ follows the syllable it modifies and displays above its base. It belongs in Vedic chant notation or scholarly transcription, not as a spelling of vi.
Specialist Sāmavedic chant notation; it signals a chant text or scholarly transcription.
Use `वि` for the syllable vi; ꣰ marks vinata.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does ꣰ appear misplaced or as a box?
A combining mark needs a font and text-shaping system with Vedic Devanagari support; without it, placement may fail or the character may appear as a missing-glyph box.
How to type ꣰
꣰\A8F0Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.