Modifier Letter High Dotted Tone Bar

It marks a high pitch level in tone notation. The vertical level shows pitch; the dot says the tone belongs to a marked category. In one convention, dotted tone letters record neutral or reduced syllables; in another, they mark short or stopped tones. Read the dot and height together—the sign alone does not tell you which convention a text follows.

The tone-letter system behind this notation was published by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao in 1930. It was designed to record speech tones so readers could reconstruct pronunciations. Chao's examples include Chinese, Tibetan, and English speech.

Why does ꜉ have a dot?

The dot marks tone category; height marks pitch. The plain tone bars ˥ ˦ ˧ ˨ ˩ represent five pitch levels; ꜉ is the dotted high-level mark. Its left-stem counterpart ꜎ belongs to notation that can distinguish an underlying tone from its spoken form after tone sandhi, a change triggered by neighboring tones.

Chinese corner marks such as ꜀ belong to a separate transcription tradition documented from the 1830s. They are connected to ꜉ as tone notation, but they are not part of Chao's dotted-bar system.