Chandrabindu
Chandrabindu is a diacritic sign with the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle. It is used in the Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Javanese and other scripts.
It usually means that the previous vowel is nasalized.
In Hindi, it is replaced in writing by anusvara when it is written above a consonant that carries a vowel symbol that extends above the top line.
In Classical Sanskrit, it seems to occur only over a lla conjunct consonant, to show that it is pronounced as a nasalized double l, which occurs if -nl- have become assimilated in sandhi.
In Vedic Sanskrit, it is used instead of anusvara to represent the sound anunaasika when the next word starts with a vowel. It usually occurs where in earlier times a word ended in -ans.
Unicode encodes chandrabindu and chandrabindu-like characters for a variety of scripts:
There is also a general-purpose combining diacritical mark COMBINING CANDRABINDU code point U+0310, but that is intended for use with Latin letters in transliteration of Indic languages.
