Chandrabindu
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Chandrabindu (meaning "moon-dot" in Sanskrit, alternatively spelled candrabindu, chandravindu, candravindu, or chôndrobindu) is a diacritic sign having the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle. It is used in the Devanagari (à¤), Bengali (à¦), Gujarati (àª), Oriya (à¬), Telugu (à°), and Javanese (ꦀ) scripts.
It usually means that the previous vowel is nasalized. It is represented in Unicode as U+0901 in Devanagari, U+0981 in Bengali, U+0A81 in Gujarati, U+0B01 in Oriya, U+0C01 in Telugu and U+A980 in Javanese. There is also a general-purpose combining diacritical mark COMBINING CANDRABINDU code point U+0310 (â—ŒÌ), but this is intended for use with Latin letters in transliteration of Indic languages.
In Hindi, it is replaced in writing by anusvara when it is written above a consonant which carries a vowel symbol which extends above the top line.
In Classical Sanskrit it only seems to occur over a lla conjunct consonant, to show that it is pronounced as a nasalized double l, which occurs where -nl- have become assimilated in sandhi.
In Vedic Sanskrit it is used instead of anusvara to represent the sound called anunaasika when the next word starts with a vowel. It usually occurs where in earlier times a word ended in -ans.
Not to be confused with
Another symbol, called the fermata, similar in appearance to an upside-down chandrabindu, is an element of musical notation.