Home: go to the homepage U+A700 to U+A71F Modifier Tone Letters
Glyph for U+A71C
Source: Noto Sans

U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow

U+A71C was added in Unicode version 5.1 in 2008. It belongs to the block U+A700 to U+A71F Modifier Tone Letters in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Modifier Letter and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+A71C forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first.

Two main kinds of downstep can be distinguished. The first, more usually called automatic downstep, downdrift or catathesis, occurs when high and low tones come in the sequence H L (L) H; the second high tone tends to be lower than the first because of the intervening low toned syllable. That phenomenon is common in African languages, such as Chichewa. It has also been argued that the same phenomenon is heard in English sentences, if these sentences are pronounced with a falling intonation, for example I really believe Ebenezer was a dealer in magnesium, or I bought blueberries, bayberries, raspberries, mulberries, and brambleberries.

Downstep proper, or non-automatic downstep, is another phenomenon found in many African languages such as Igbo (see for an overview of downstep in African languages). When two high tones are in succeeding syllables (thus in the sequence H H), and the second is lower than the first, there is said to be a downstep.

The symbol for the second kind of downstep in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript down arrow, (). It is common to see instead a superscript exclamation mark (!) because of typographic constraints, though technically that would mean an incompletely or lightly articulated alveolar click release.

It has been shown that in most, if not all, cases of downstep proper, the lowering of the second high tone occurs when an intervening low-toned syllable has dropped out. What was H (L) H has become HH. The missing low-toned syllable creates what is known as a 'floating tone'. An example occurs in Bambara, a language spoken in Mali. In Bambara, the definite article is a floating low tone. With a noun in isolation, it docks to the preceding vowel and turns a high tone into a falling tone:

However, when it occurs between two high tones, it downsteps the following tone:

Representations

System Representation
42780
UTF-8 EA 9C 9C
UTF-16 A7 1C
UTF-32 00 00 A7 1C
URL-Quoted %EA%9C%9C
HTML hex reference ꜜ
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake ◌ꜜ
AGL: Latin-5 uniA71C

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age (age) 5.1 (2008)
Unicode Name (na) MODIFIER LETTER RAISED DOWN ARROW
Unicode 1 Name (na1)
Block (blk) Modifier Tone Letters
General Category (gc) Modifier Letter
Script (sc) Common
Bidirectional Category (bc) Other Neutral
Combining Class (ccc) Not Reordered
Decomposition Type (dt) none
Decomposition Mapping (dm) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Lowercase (Lower)
Simple Lowercase Mapping (slc) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Lowercase Mapping (lc) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Uppercase (Upper)
Simple Uppercase Mapping (suc) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Uppercase Mapping (uc) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Simple Titlecase Mapping (stc) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Titlecase Mapping (tc) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Case Folding (cf) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
ASCII Hex Digit (AHex)
Alphabetic (Alpha)
Bidi Control (Bidi_C)
Bidi Mirrored (Bidi_M)
Composition Exclusion (CE)
Case Ignorable (CI)
Changes When Casefolded (CWCF)
Changes When Casemapped (CWCM)
Changes When NFKC Casefolded (CWKCF)
Changes When Lowercased (CWL)
Changes When Titlecased (CWT)
Changes When Uppercased (CWU)
Cased (Cased)
Full Composition Exclusion (Comp_Ex)
Default Ignorable Code Point (DI)
Dash (Dash)
Deprecated (Dep)
Diacritic (Dia)
Emoji Modifier Base (EBase)
Emoji Component (EComp)
Emoji Modifier (EMod)
Emoji Presentation (EPres)
Emoji (Emoji)
Extender (Ext)
Extended Pictographic (ExtPict)
FC NFKC Closure (FC_NFKC) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Grapheme Cluster Break (GCB) Any
Grapheme Base (Gr_Base)
Grapheme Extend (Gr_Ext)
Grapheme Link (Gr_Link)
Hex Digit (Hex)
Hyphen (Hyphen)
ID Continue (IDC)
ID Start (IDS)
IDS Binary Operator (IDSB)
IDS Trinary Operator and (IDST)
IDSU (IDSU) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue (ID_Compat_Math_Continue) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Start (ID_Compat_Math_Start) 0
Ideographic (Ideo)
InCB (InCB) None
Indic Mantra Category (InMC)
Indic Positional Category (InPC) NA
Indic Syllabic Category (InSC) Other
Jamo Short Name (JSN)
Join Control (Join_C)
Logical Order Exception (LOE)
Math (Math)
Noncharacter Code Point (NChar)
NFC Quick Check (NFC_QC) Yes
NFD Quick Check (NFD_QC) Yes
NFKC Casefold (NFKC_CF) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
NFKC Quick Check (NFKC_QC) Yes
NFKC_SCF (NFKC_SCF) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
NFKD Quick Check (NFKD_QC) Yes
Other Alphabetic (OAlpha)
Other Default Ignorable Code Point (ODI)
Other Grapheme Extend (OGr_Ext)
Other ID Continue (OIDC)
Other ID Start (OIDS)
Other Lowercase (OLower)
Other Math (OMath)
Other Uppercase (OUpper)
Prepended Concatenation Mark (PCM)
Pattern Syntax (Pat_Syn)
Pattern White Space (Pat_WS)
Quotation Mark (QMark)
Regional Indicator (RI)
Radical (Radical)
Sentence Break (SB) Other Letter
Soft Dotted (SD)
Sentence Terminal (STerm)
Terminal Punctuation (Term)
Unified Ideograph (UIdeo)
Variation Selector (VS)
Word Break (WB) Alphabetic Letter
White Space (WSpace)
XID Continue (XIDC)
XID Start (XIDS)
Expands On NFC (XO_NFC)
Expands On NFD (XO_NFD)
Expands On NFKC (XO_NFKC)
Expands On NFKD (XO_NFKD)
Bidi Paired Bracket (bpb) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Bidi Paired Bracket Type (bpt) None
East Asian Width (ea) neutral
Hangul Syllable Type (hst) Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment (isc)
Joining Group (jg) No_Joining_Group
Joining Type (jt) Non Joining
Line Break (lb) Alphabetic
Numeric Type (nt) none
Numeric Value (nv) not a number
Simple Case Folding (scf) Glyph for U+A71C Modifier Letter Raised Down Arrow
Script Extension (scx)
Vertical Orientation (vo) R