Ŋ Information
Eng or engma (majuscule: Ŋ, minuscule: ŋ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a velar nasal (as in English singing) in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
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History
This letter was designed by Alexander Gill the Elder in 1619.[1] It was later used in Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet, with its current phonetic value.
Appearance
Lowercase eng is derived from n with the addition of a hook to the right leg, somewhat like that of j. The uppercase has two variants: it can be based on the usual uppercase N, with a hook added (or "N-form"); or it can be an enlarged version of the lowercase (or "n-form"). The former is preferred in Sami languages that use it, the latter in African languages[citation needed].
An 1856 text in Gamilaraay, using a rotated capital G as a substitute for ŋ.Early printers, lacking a specific glyph for eng, sometimes approximated it by rotating a capital G, or by substituting a Greek eta (η) for it.
Usage
Technical transcription
- Americanist phonetic notation (where it may also represent a uvular nasal)
- Sometimes for the transcription of Australian Aboriginal languages
- International Phonetic Alphabet
- Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
- Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German, the Low Rhenish, and few related languages
Vernacular orthographies
Janalif variant of Eng is represented as N with descender.Languages marked † no longer use eng, but formerly did.
- African languages
- American languages
- Australian Aboriginal languages
- Languages of China
- Zhuang† (replaced by the digraph ng in 1986)
- Sami languages
- Turkic languages during Latinisation (USSR) used Ꞑ ꞑ, sometimes considered a variant of Eng.
- Constructed languages
- Na'vi language from James Cameron's Avatar
Computer encoding
Eng is present in ISO 8859-4 (Latin-4) in order to write the Sami languages, at BD (uppercase) and BF (lowercase). In Unicode, it is in the Latin Extended-A range and it is encoded as U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG and U+014B LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG.
References
- ^ The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, David Crystal
See also
Similar Latin letters:
Similar Cyrillic letters:
| The ISO basic Latin alphabet · · | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
|
Letter N with diacritics
Ńń
Ǹǹ
Ňň
Ññ
Ṅṅ
Ņņ
Ṇṇ
Ṋṋ
Ṉṉ
N̈n̈
Ɲɲ
ȠƞŊŋꞐꞑ
ᵰ
ᶇ
ɳ
ȵ
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |
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External links
Categories: Uncommon Latin letters | Phonetic transcription symbols
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