U+1E96 "ẖ" Latin Small Letter H with Line Below Unicode Character

U+1E96 "ẖ" Latin Small Letter H with Line Below is a specialized typographic symbol used primarily in certain Romanized transcription systems for Semitic languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, to represent a voiceless pharyngeal fricative sound, which is distinct from the standard English "h". This character is constructed by combining a lowercase "h" with a combining macron below, a diacritical mark that signals a specific phonetic alteration. It falls within the Latin Extended Additional block of the Unicode standard, ensuring consistent representation across digital texts and fonts. The "ẖ" is notably employed in academic works on linguistics, biblical studies, and philology to accurately transliterate sounds like the Hebrew letter "ח" (chet) or the Arabic letter "ح" (ḥāʾ), preserving important distinctions that would otherwise be lost in plain Latin transcription.