Eng (letter)

Eng or engma (capital: Ŋ, lowercase: 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

The First grammatical treatise, a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Icelandic language, uses a single grapheme for the eng sound, shaped like a g with a stroke ⟨g⟩. Alexander Gill the Elder uses an uppercase G with a hooked tail and a lowercase n with the hooked tail of a script g ⟨ŋ⟩ for the same sound in Logonomia Anglica in 1619.^[1] William Holder uses the letter in Elements of speech: An essay of inquiry into the natural production of letters published in 1669, however it was not printed as intended, he indicates in his errata that “there was intented a character for Ng, viz., n with a tail like that of g, which must be understood where the Printer has imitated it by n or y”.^[2] It was later used in Benjamin Franklin 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 in African languages^{[citation needed]}.

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 (encoded in Unicode as the Latin letter n with long leg: Ƞ ƞ).

• 

  Italic ŋ based on double storey g as used in Horatio Hale (1846) Ethnography and Philology.

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
• Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German, the Low Rhenish, and few related languages

Vernacular orthographies

Janalif variant of Eng is represented as N with descender. An equivalent version is used in the Cyrillic alphabet.

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

• African languages
  • Bari
  • Bemba
  • Dinka
  • Ewe
  • Fula
  • Ganda
  • Manding languages
  • Songhay languages
  • Tonga
  • Wolof
• American languages
  • O'odham
• Australian Aboriginal languages
  • Bandjalang
  • Yolngu
• 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) used Ꞑ ꞑ, sometimes considered a variant of Eng.

Computer encoding

Eng is encoded in Unicode as U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG and U+014B LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG, part of the Latin Extended-A range. In ISO 8859-4 (Latin-4) it's located at BD (uppercase) and BF (lowercase).

In African languages such as Bemba, ng' (with an apostrophe) is widely used as a substitute in media where eng is hard to reproduce.

See also

• Ng (digraph)
• Nh (digraph)

Similar Latin letters:

• Ƞ ƞ
• Ɲ ɲ
• ɳ
• ꞑ
• ɱ

Similar Cyrillic letters:

• Ӈ ӈ
• Ң ң
• Ҥ ҥ

References

1. ↑ David Crystal (2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
2. ↑ Robert W. Albright (1958). The International Phonetic Alphabet: Its Backgrounds and Development, Indiana University. p. 11

External links

• Practical Orthography of African Languages
• FileFormat.info – Fonts that support LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG (U+014A) and LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG (U+014B)