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Concept
Eng (letter)
Summary
Eng or engma (capital: Ŋ, lowercase: ŋ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a voiced velar nasal (as in English sii) in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
In Washo, lower-case represents a typical [ŋ] sound, while upper-case represents a voiceless [ŋ̊] sound. This convention comes from Americanist phonetic notation.
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 .
Alexander Gill the Elder uses an uppercase G with a hooked tail and a lowercase n with the hooked tail of a script g for the same sound in Logonomia Anglica in 1619. William Holder uses the letter in Elements of Speech: An Essay of Inquiry into the Natural Production of Letters, published in 1669, but it was not printed as intended; he indicates in his errata that “there was intended 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”.
It was later used in Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet, with its current phonetic value. It was supposed to be in English but failed.
Lowercase eng is derived from n, with the addition of a hook to the right leg, somewhat like that of j. Nowadays, the uppercase has two main 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, such as in Shona from 1931 to 1955, and several in west and central Africa currently. In Isaac Pitman’s Phonotypic Alphabet, the uppercase had a reversed-N form.
Early printers, lacking a specific glyph for eng, sometimes approximated it by rotating a capital G, or by substituting a Greek letter η (eta) before modified to present form for it (encoded in Unicode as the Latin letter n with long leg: Ƞ ƞ).
File:Ngummi.
Official source
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