J�rg Knappen schrieb:
The thing is used in some transliteration of russian, where the letter <ya> is transcribed as \t{\ia}, i. e. an inverted breve placed between a dotless i (\i) and a. A sample can be found in Donald E. Knuth, the TeXbook.
Just looked up the example in the TeXbook where this tie accent is used for scientific transliteration of Russian in the LOC system. In the TeXbook (p. 53), the accent is short, while in the LOC transliteration guidelines it's long. I don't think \t{\i a} warrants a separate accent; I'd put the blame on Knuth, rather, for using such a short glyph in his CM fonts. The LOC tables for Russian are online at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/russian.pdf; the TeXbook is online at http://books.pdox.net/Computers/The%20Texbook.ps (if you want a time warp back into the dark ages of computing when fonts had 128 positions ;)
U+0361 will do in this case, I think (well, even though probably not for TeX...)
Philipp
