Modifier Letter Low Down Arrowhead

It marks less lip rounding on the sound before it. This makes ˯ the UPA delabialization symbol: the lips are less rounded than for the sound's plain form. In examples such as o˯, u˯ and š˯, the mark follows and qualifies that sound.

UPA/FUT is a specialist transcription system for describing and reconstructing Uralic languages, a language family. It supports precise work on speech sounds, sound patterns and word histories. Its first published proposal appeared in 1901 in the journal Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen, associated with Eemil Nestor Setälä.

Before UPA, 19th-century Swedish landsmålsalfabetet and Norwegian Norvegia were among the transcription schemes used in Uralic studies. In 2002, a Unicode proposal sought to encode the established UPA set so plain-text documents could be searched and processed.

Why are these arrowhead marks easy to confuse?

The outline is a poor guide; each mark has its own notation job. In UPA, ˯ marks less rounding. ˅ is a separate modifier for lowered articulation; Americanist phonetic notation and some non-standard IPA transcriptions also use it for a lowered vowel. ˬ marks voicing in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), another system for writing speech sounds. The UPA proposal kept ˯ distinct from ˬ because their roles and glyph forms differ.

In the UPA proposal, ˰, ˱ and ˲ are companion low arrowheads. The combining marks ◌͔ and ◌͕ indicate backed or retracted, and advanced or fronted, tongue positions. Those describe tongue position; ˯ describes lip rounding.

UPA arrowheads can have unequal arms. Check the transcription key instead of reading their outlines by eye.

How do I type ˯ without changing the notation?

Write it after the base as its own spacing character. It does not attach below like a combining mark, so replacing it with ◌͔, ◌͕ or a caron changes the notation.

Use a UPA-aware keyboard or character picker, and check that your font supports the mark. A 2005 UPA implementation report describes custom macros, keyboard-layout work and problems stacking dense marks in HTML.