Sogdian Combining Two Dots Below

It adds a mark below a Sogdian letter. Points above and below helped distinguish vowel sounds and letters that had come to share a shape. In Christian Sogdian written with Syriac letters, they could mark vowel qualities; later Sogdian texts also used diacritics to tell merged letter forms apart.

The earliest substantial Sogdian manuscripts, the Ancient Letters, date to the early 4th century. Diacritics are not uncommon in texts later than the 8th century. The surviving Sogdian traditions do not establish one fixed value for this exact two-dot form.

Sogdian writing grew from an Aramaic-derived tradition and used the East Syrian system of points. Sogdian cursive later became the basis for Old Uyghur writing, which in turn led to Mongolian; the Old Uyghur form 𐾅 is a related mark, encoded separately.

How do I type 𐽇 correctly?

Append 𐽇 after the Sogdian letter it marks. As a nonspacing mark, it attaches to a base letter instead of taking its own advance width. Moving it to another base changes which letter it marks.

A Unicode-aware input method with Sogdian support can enter it. Typing .. produces two punctuation characters, not this mark.

Why does 𐽇 render differently?

An isolated mark may need a visible placeholder. Some fonts show a dotted circle so the mark has a base to appear on; the circle is not part of 𐽇. Without Sogdian font support, the mark may be misplaced or invisible.