Ts digraph with retroflex hook

One phonetic letter for a voiceless retroflex affricate.

ꭧ writes that sound in a single letter: a t-like closure releases into a voiceless hiss with the tongue tip curled back. “Affricate” names a stop followed by a hiss; “retroflex” describes the curled-back tongue position.

The earliest printed example cited is in Fāng Guóyú’s 1995 dictionary of Naxi pictographic writing, a system used by the Naxi people; Lǐ Líncàn’s 2001 Naxi dictionary shows it too. A 2017 Unicode proposal describes ꭧ as an established Sinological digraph used to keep a compact letter form in linguistic texts. It notes that the IPA had deprecated older digraph letters in favor of linked sound sequences, while Sinological transcription kept the compact forms.

Is ꭧ the same as t + s?

No. ꭧ is its own encoded phonetic letter.

The IPA spelling ʈ͡ʂ uses two symbols joined by a tie; ꭧ is one separately encoded letter. Typing t then s leaves two letters and does not produce ꭧ. The 2017 proposal treats ꭧ as its own character, not a presentation form assembled from a sequence.