What ꜖ means
It marks the lowest pitch level in Chao-style notation.
Chao-style tone notation records speech pitch on a five-level scale. Alone, ꜖ marks the lowest level; by itself it is level, not a falling contour. In a sequence, each tone letter gives one point in the pitch path.
Linguist Yuen Ren Chao presented tone letters in a 1930 paper as a practical way to record pitch. Its examples include spoken Lhasa Tibetan and Cantonese; ꜖ appears in the Tibetan transcription. Unicode describes the left-stem series as mirror-image counterparts to the basic IPA tone bars .
Why does ꜖ point left?
Its direction can mark a transcription convention, not a different pitch level.
Some Chinese phonology transcriptions put a right-stem letter first for a word’s underlying tone, then a left-stem letter for its surface tone after tone sandhi—a pitch change caused by neighboring tones. In that convention, ꜖ can mark an extra-low surface value.
A Unicode discussion in 2003 documented this pairing and recommended sequences of level letters to write contours. Depending on font shaping, the letters may appear as separate bars or join into one contour.
On its own, ꜖ identifies a pitch level but not the full convention. Read the neighboring marks or ask which notation system the author is using.
Specialist phonetic notation: it marks pitch in a transcription.
Do not read a single ꜖ as a falling contour; the sequence supplies that context.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsThe lowest pitch level; a level value by itself, not a falling contour.
Don't confuse it with
2
Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
2Why do tone bars join in some fonts?
They join when a font shapes a tone-letter sequence into one contour; fonts without that support show separate bars.
Can I read ꜖ without surrounding transcription?
Not fully. It marks one pitch level, but the notation shows whether it stands alone, belongs to a contour, or pairs with an underlying tone.
More like this
10
How to type or find ꜖
- Also called
- extra-low tone letter · left-stem tone bar · reversed tone letter
- Search it as
- tone bar · tone letter · tone sandhi · Chao tone letters · left stem · extra-low pitch · IPA
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
꜖\A716Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.