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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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Related concepts (2)
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy (Magna Graecia). The Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was adopted by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
J
J, or j, is the tenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is jay (pronounced 'dʒeɪ), with a now-uncommon variant jy 'dʒaɪ. When used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiced palatal approximant, it may be called yod or jod (pronounced 'jɒd or 'joʊd). The letter J used to be used as the swash letter I, used for the letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII or xxiii for the Roman numeral twenty-three.