What ͔ means
It marks retraction: articulation farther back in the mouth.
The UPA and FUT describe Uralic languages. This mark modifies the preceding vowel or consonant; t͔ can mark a post-alveolar t sound, made just behind the ridge where the upper teeth meet the gums.
These systems were designed to record how sounds are made and used in a language, and how words connect through history; they draw on Finnish, Cyrillic, and Greek writing traditions.
Why can ͔ appear inside a dotted circle?
The circle is a placeholder when the mark has no base letter.
Put the base letter first: t͔. A letter's descender can push the mark to the right, while a font that cannot position it may leave the dotted-circle placeholder visible. The arrowhead belongs to the phonetic notation; it is not a stand-alone instruction to move left.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does ͔ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type ͔
͔\0354Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.