U+0708 "܈" Syriac Supralinear Colon Skewed Left Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
܈
U+0708 "܈" Syriac Supralinear Colon Skewed Left is a punctuation mark used in Classical Syriac and some modern Syriac liturgical texts, functioning as a supralinear diacritical colon that is tilted to the left to indicate a specific type of pause or rhythmic division in chanting or reading, particularly in biblical or liturgical manuscripts. Unlike a standard colon, its elevated position and slant differentiate it from other punctuation, such as the Supralinear Colon Skewed Right, helping scribes and readers maintain the proper cadence and emphatic breaks in religious recitation. This character is part of the Syriac block in Unicode, which was included to support the precise rendering of ancient and medieval Syriac orthography.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+0708 |
| Version Added | 3.0 |
| Name | Syriac Supralinear Colon Skewed Left |
| Block | Syriac |
| General Category | Other Punctuation |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Arabic Letter |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ܈ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ܈ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xDC 0x88 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x0708 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00000708 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u0708 |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFD Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKD Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| Script | Syriac |
| Script Extensions | Syriac |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| Terminal Punctuation | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Rotated |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Other |
| Sentence Break | Other |