Left Low Paraphrase Bracket

It marks reported words or an editorial addition.

N’Ko is a writing system Solomana Kanté created for Manding languages, to support education and write them more adequately than Arabic or Latin scripts. In N’Ko, ⸜ pairs with ⸝ around an indirect quotation—a report, not the speaker’s exact words—or text an editor added even though it is absent from the source.

Editors of Medieval Nordic manuscripts also used ⸜ to close text added in a margin. Accounts date Kanté’s completed N’Ko script to 1947; orthography notes date its design to 1949. Unicode accepted the pair as general punctuation in 2004 after a proposal focused on N’Ko. That records computer standardization, not invention. The N’Ko and Nordic conventions share the encoded mark, but that alone does not establish borrowing.

Why can ⸜ look reversed?

Right-to-left N’Ko text can mirror the bracket pair.

The marks indicate logical start and end, not fixed screen sides. Bidirectional layout can mirror their shapes, so the visible slant alone does not show that the wrong character was used. In N’Ko, ⸜ starts the span and ⸝ closes it; the text direction handles their display.

Can I use ⸜ in an English message?

Only if your readers know the convention.

As of 2026, ⸜ has no documented general convention in English messaging; its established settings are N’Ko punctuation and specialist editorial notation. In an ordinary English message, familiar brackets or a short explanation will be clearer. If someone sends it without that context, ask what convention they mean.