Eng (letter)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Contents 1 Appearance 2 Usage 2.1 Technical transcription 2.2 Vernacular orthographies 3 Computer encoding 4 See also 5 External links

[edit] 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.

[edit] Usage

[edit] 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

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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.

[edit] See also

• Ng (digraph)
• Nh (digraph)

Similar Latin letters:

• Ƞ ƞ
• Ɲ ɲ
• ɳ
• ɱ

Similar Cyrillic letters:

• Ӈ ӈ
• Ң ң
• Ҥ ҥ

The Basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

[edit] External links

• Practical Orthography of African Languages