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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and ŋ. It is used for a voiceless y-like sound,[clarification needed] such as in Dania transcription of the Danish language.
Heng | |
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Ꜧ ꜧ | |
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Usage | |
Writing system | Latin script |
Type | Alphabetic |
Language of origin | Unified Northern Alphabet |
History | |
Development |
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Other | |
Heng 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.[citation needed]
Heng has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a jocular phoneme in English, which includes both [h] and [ŋ] as its allophones, to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. /h/ and /ŋ/ are separate phonemes in English, even though no minimal pair for them exists due to their complementary distribution.[1]
Heng is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative ([ɮ]).[2]
Both U+A726 Ꜧ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HENG and U+A727 ꜧ LATIN SMALL LETTER HENG are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D; they were added with Unicode version 5.1 in April 2008.
A variant form, U+0267 ɧ LATIN SMALL LETTER HENG WITH HOOK, is encoded as part of the IPA Extensions Block. It is used to represent the voiceless palatal-velar fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet. U+10797 𐞗 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL HENG WITH HOOK is used as a superscript IPA letter.[3]
The Teuthonista phonetic transcription system uses both heng and U+AB5C ꭜ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL HENG.[4]
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