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**[[Northern Sami]]
**[[Northern Sami]]
**[[Skolt Sami]]
**[[Skolt Sami]]
*[[Turkic languages]] during [[Latinisation (USSR)]].
*[[Turkic languages]] during [[Latinisation (USSR)]] used [[ꞑ|Ꞑ ꞑ]], sometimes considred a variant of Eng.
**[[Tatar language|Tatar]]† (now ''ñ'' in Latin or ''ң'' in Cyrillic, see [[Jaŋalif]] and image above)
*[[Constructed languages]]
*[[Constructed languages]]
**[[Na'vi language]] from James Cameron's ''[[Avatar (2009 film)|Avatar]]''
**[[Na'vi language]] from James Cameron's ''[[Avatar (2009 film)|Avatar]]''

Revision as of 18:50, 11 February 2011

The letter eng, with its two variant capital forms.

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.

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 is preffered in African languages.

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

Vernacular orthographies

Janalif variant of Eng is represented as N with descender.

Languages marked † no longer use eng, but formerly did.

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

  1. ^ The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, David Crystal

See also

Similar Latin letters:

Similar Cyrillic letters:

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