Vedic Tone Two Dots Below

It marks a low pitch in one Vedic recitation pattern. ᳞ appears in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, a prose text in Vedic Sanskrit. It marks the low pitch heard on a syllable in a pattern shaped by a pause. A high-pitched syllable just before the pause, or one syllable earlier, receives this mark when a high pitch or a falling pitch on its own syllable follows after the pause. A low-pitched syllable immediately before the pause receives it when a falling pitch on its own syllable follows.

The earliest known printed example of this exact form appears in a 1964 edition from the Vedic Yantrālaya press. That date marks a printed witness, not the invention of the convention; the notation comes through a longer manuscript and edition tradition.

Why do editions use different marks?

Different editions record different marks for related recitation patterns.

A 2007 Unicode encoding proposal records the Vedic Yantrālaya edition with two dots, Weber’s edition with three dots for a related Śatapatha pattern, and the Kāśī/Acyuta Granthamālā edition with no mark for corresponding cases. These differences reflect edition and recitation traditions: Vedic traditions can give the same written sign different spoken pitches, so font decoration alone does not explain them.