Heng (letter)

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, such as in Dania transcription of the Danish language.

Ꜧ ꜧ
Not to be confused with the Cyrillic letter Shha with hook.
Heng
Ꜧ ꜧ
Capital and lowercase letter Heng
Usage
Writing systemLatin script
TypeAlphabetic
Language of originUnified Northern Alphabet
History
Development
  • Ꜧ ꜧ
Other

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]

It is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative ([ɮ]).

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.

Transcription

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[2]

Teuthonista

The Teuthonista phonetic transcription system uses both heng and U+AB5C ꭜ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL HENG.[3]

See also

References
  1. Hornsby, David (2014). Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself. ISBN 9781444180343.
  2. Miller, Kirk; Ashby, Michael (2020-11-08). "L2/20-252R: Unicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), pulmonic" (PDF).
  3. Everson, Michael; Dicklberger, Alois; Pentzlin, Karl; Wandl-Vogt, Eveline (2011-06-02). "L2/11-202: Revised proposal to encode "Teuthonista" phonetic characters in the UCS" (PDF).
  • Chao, Yuen Ren (1934). "The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems". Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. 4 (4): 363–397.
  • Pullum, Geoffrey K.; Ladusaw, William A. (1996). Phonetic Symbol Guide. University of Chicago Press. p. 77.


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