Heng is a letter of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

, originating as a

typographic ligature In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters and used in English and French, in which the letters and are joined for the first ligature ...

of '' h'' and '' ŋ''. It is used for a voiceless ''y''-like sound, such as in

Dania transcription Dania (Latin for ''Denmark'') is the traditional linguistic transcription system used in Denmark to describe the Danish language. It was invented by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen and published in 1890 in the magazine from which the system was ...

of the Danish language. Heng was used word-finally in early transcriptions of

Mayan languages The Mayan languages In linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and a ...

, where it may have represented a

uvular Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not prov ...

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

. It is sometimes used to write

Judeo-Tat Judeo-Tat or Juhuri (, , ) is a Judeo-Persian dialect and the traditional language spoken by the Mountain Jews in the eastern Caucasus Mountains, especially Azerbaijan, parts of Russia and today in Israel. It belongs to the southwestern group ...

. Heng has been occasionally used by

phonologist Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...

s to represent a jocular

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

in English, which includes both and as its

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

s, to illustrate the limited usefulness of

minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate t ...

s to distinguish phonemes. and are separate phonemes in English, even though no minimal pair for them exists due to their

complementary distribution In linguistics, complementary distribution (as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation) is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other ele ...

. Heng is also used in

Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language * Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle *Black Association for National ...

linguistics to indicate a

voiced alveolar lateral fricative The voiced alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is (sometime ...

(). Both and are encoded in Unicode block

Latin Extended-D Latin Extended-D is a Unicode block containing Latin (script), Latin characters for phonetic, Mayanist, and Medieval transcription and notation systems. 89 of the characters in this block are for medieval characters proposed by the Medieval Unic ...

; they were added with Unicode version 5.1 in April 2008.

Transcription

A variant form, , is encoded as part of the IPA Extensions Block. It is used to represent the

voiceless palatal-velar fricative The ''sj''-sound ( ) is a voiceless fricative phoneme found in the sound system of most dialects of Swedish. It has a variety of realisations, whose precise phonetic characterisation is a matter of debate, but which usually feature distinct la ...

in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

. is used as a superscript IPA letter.

Teuthonista

The

Teuthonista Teuthonista is a phonetic transcription system used predominantly for the transcription of High German languages, (High) German dialects. It is very similar to other Central European transcription systems from the early 20th century. The base cha ...

phonetic transcription system uses both heng and .

Transcription

Teuthonista

See also

References

Further reading