Combining Ligature Left Half Below

It opens a below tie; ︨ closes it. In phonetic notation, the tie shows that two or more letter symbols belong together as one sound or are made at the same time. Place ︧ after the first letter in the group and ︨ after the last; any letters between them fall inside the span. Alone, ︧ is a combining piece with no complete reading.

The documented trail is phonetic. The earliest published source cited in the encoding proposal is Catford’s 1988 phonetics textbook; it also names Pullum and Ladusaw’s 1996 guide and the 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. The proposal used “Bottom Ligature” for a tie marking sounds made together or treated as one segment. The Handbook used “bottom tie bar” for linking sounds while showing a combining below-tie form elsewhere. A combining mark attaches to letters; a spacing mark occupies its own position. In 2003, a Unicode proposal distinguished the combining tie from the spacing undertie and encoded the complete below tie as U+035C.

How do I use ︧ correctly?

For two letters, use the complete mark ͜. It is the combining form preferred for an ordinary two-letter tie below; a lone ︧ is not a shorter version of it.

The half-mark forms preserve a way to tie several base letters. Unicode describes them as legacy support and notes that long continuous lines may be better handled with text styling.