Tie-bar

From KneeQuickie

A tie-bar is used in the IPA to join two sounds into a single segment. If the two sounds are at different places of articulation, they are to be interpreted as a coarticulate; the usual convention for coarticulates is to place the farther back sound first. A tie-bar can also be used to join a plosive and fricative at the same place of articulation to form an affricate. Some dictionaries also use a tie-bar to join two vowels into a diphthong; this is not, however, official IPA practice.

In X-Sampa, the tie-bar is replaced by an underscore. This is used in the same way as the IPA tie-bar for coarticulates, but it is recommended that it be omitted for affricates, a disjunctor (the hyphen) being used instead when a plosive and homorganic fricative are adjacent but do not form an affricate.

In Z-Sampa, an alternative to the underscore is to place a right parenthesis after the two connected symbols, not between them: ts) not t_s.

The tie-bar, is, unfortunately, rather difficult to write correctly with most Unicode fonts. The Unicode symbol for the tie-bar is hex code 0361, for example: d͡z.