Eng (letter)

Eng (letter)

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.

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.

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

Vernacular orthographies

Languages marked † no longer use eng, but formerly did.
*African languages
**Bari
**Dinka
**Ewe
**Fula
**Luganda
**Manding languages
**Songhay languages
**Wolof
*American languages
**O'odham
*Australian Aboriginal languages
**Bandjalang
*Languages of China
**Zhuang† (replaced by the digraph "ng" in 1986)
*Sami languages
**Inari Sami
**Lule Sami
**Northern Sami
**Skolt Sami
*Turkic languages during Latinisation (USSR).
**Tatar† (now "ñ" in Latin or "ң" in Cyrillic, see Jaŋalif and image above)

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 encoded as U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG and U+014B LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG.

ee also

*Ng (digraph)
*Nh (digraph)Similar Latin letters:
*unicode|Ƞ ƞ
*unicode|Ɲ ɲ
*unicode|ɳ
*unicode|ɱSimilar Cyrillic letters:
*unicode|Ӈ ӈ
*unicode|Ң ң
*unicode|Ҥ ҥ

External links

* [http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/poal30.htm Practical Orthography of African Languages]


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