Double Oblique Hyphen

It marks a boundary between a word and an attached ending or clitic. In Coptic, ⸗ marks a verb form before a personal suffix, a pronoun ending attached to a word, distinguishing it from a form before an incorporated noun.

Ludwig Stern’s 1880 Coptic grammar apparently introduced the double form for verbs before personal suffixes. It contrasted with a single hyphen, which marked a verb form before an incorporated noun; Coptic grammars had used single hyphens to divide word parts by 1830. The double form also extended to prepositions and other words taking personal suffixes. The Demotic convention appears to have come from Coptic; in Demotic transcription, ⸗ marks a pronoun ending attached to the preceding noun. The shape’s deeper origin is unclear; a 2003 proposal suggested a German philological Fraktur hyphen as a possible model.

The Hittite convention in the Chicago Hittite Dictionary appears to have grown from =. There, ⸗ marks some clitic boundaries; a clitic is a short element that leans on a neighboring word, and the slanted form can be told apart from mathematical equality. Other Hittite editions also use = for the boundary. The 1980 L–N volume of the dictionary used ⸗ for word breaks at line ends too; by 2003, later volumes had switched to a tilde-hyphen for that job.

Is ⸗ an equals sign or a hyphen?

It is its own editorial mark, not a mathematical equals sign. Some Coptic, Demotic, and Hittite editions use = for a comparable linguistic boundary; its role comes from the transcription convention, not arithmetic.

Fraktur is a blackletter type style: it can draw an ordinary hyphen as two slanted strokes, but that font shape remains an ordinary hyphen. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary uses ⸗ at a line break when a word’s spelling already contains a hyphen, showing that the hyphen remains in the unbroken word. In that convention, ⸗ records the dictionary’s line-break display; it is not a soft-hyphen line-break instruction.