Modifier letter shelf

Link the final consonant to the sound that follows. The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) records speech sounds rather than ordinary spelling. With ˽, a written word boundary does not mean the sounds are pronounced separately. The link can involve assimilation, where a sound becomes more like its neighbour, or a consonant held longer.

Its name describes its low, shelf-like shape. In text, it occupies its own position: it is neither a blank space nor an accent that attaches underneath another letter. It gives information about surrounding sounds rather than representing a sound of its own.

UPA grew out of Finnish linguist E. N. Setälä’s work at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is a separate transcription tradition from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so similar-looking marks need not have the same meaning.