title: What is the difference between "combining characters" and "modifier letters"?
body: <p>In the Unicode standard, there are diacritical marks, such as U+0302, COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT (◌̂), and U+02C6, MODIFIER LETTER CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT (ˆ). I know that combining characters are combined with the previous letter to, say, make a letter like "ô", but what are modifier letters used for? Is it just a printable representation of the combining character, and if so, how is that different from the plain U+005E, CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT (^)?</p>
  
  <p>[I'm not interested int the circumflex itself, but rather this class of characters (there seem to be many of them, as you can see <a href="https://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/n_0300.html" rel="noreferrer">here</a>).]</p>