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.
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[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
- American languages
- Australian Aboriginal languages
- Languages of China
- Zhuang† (replaced by the digraph ng in 1986)
- Sami languages
- Turkic languages
[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
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 | |
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history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters |
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