What ˻ means
It opens a low-tone stretch in UPA transcription.
UPA is the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, a way for linguists to write pronunciation details in Uralic-language research. The source's notation key defines the exact span this mark governs.
UPA was proposed in 1901; a Lagercrantz sample from 1939 is the earliest dated example of ˻ in the proposal record.
Earlier, 19th-century research on Uralic languages in Scandinavia used the Swedish landsmålsalfabetet, a dialect-sound writing system, and the Norwegian Norvegia system. They belong to that older transcription context, not to a different reading of ˻.
Why check the source's transcription key?
The key defines the mark's scope in that work.
UPA's related tone marks show the boundaries: ˻ starts low tone, ˼ ends it, ˹ starts high tone, and ˺ ends it. So ˻ marks a beginning; a closing mark can show how far the low-tone stretch runs.
It is a spacing modifier: it occupies its own place in the text rather than combining with a vowel as an accent would.
Specialist phonetic notation: in UPA, it marks the start of a low-tone stretch.
Check the text's key: ˻ marks a start, so it may not show where the low-tone stretch ends.
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 ˻
˻\02FBCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.