Heng (letter)

For other uses, see Heng.

Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, derived from h combined with something similar to eng.

It was used word-finally in early transcriptions of Mayan languages, where it may have represented a uvular fricative.

It is sometimes used to write Judeo-Tat.

It has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a hypothetical phoneme in English, which includes both [h] and [ŋ] as its allophones, -- to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. Normally /h/ and /ŋ/ are considered separate phonemes in English, even though a minimal pair for them cannot be constructed, due to their complementary distribution.[1]

Both U+A726 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HENG (HTML Ꜧ) and U+A727 LATIN SMALL LETTER HENG (HTML ꜧ) are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D.

IPA usage

A variant form, U+0267 ɧ LATIN SMALL LETTER HENG WITH HOOK (HTML ɧ), is encoded as part of the IPA Extensions block. It is used to represent the voiceless palatal-velar fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

References

  1. Hornsby, David (2014). Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself.


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