Eng (letter)

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The letter eng, with its two variant capital forms.
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.

Contents

[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.

An 1856 text in Gamilaraay, using a rotated capital G as a substitute for ŋ.
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.

[edit] Usage

[edit] Technical transcription

[edit] Vernacular orthographies

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

[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 Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters

[edit] External links

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