Ꞑ, ꞑ (''
N with
descender'') 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 ...
, used in several
New Turkic alphabet orthographies in 1930s (for instance,
Tatar alphabet), as well as in the 1990s orthographies invented in attempts to restore the Latin alphabet for the
Tatar language
Tatar ( ; or ) is a Turkic languages, Turkic language spoken by the Volga Tatars mainly located in modern Tatarstan (European Russia), as well as Siberia. It should not be confused with Crimean Tatar language, Crimean Tatar or Siberian Tatar ...
and the
Chechen language.
In the majority of languages this letter represented a
velar nasal
The voiced velar nasal, also known as eng, engma, or agma (from Greek 'fragment'), is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ''ng'' in English ''sing'' as well as ''n'' before velar consonants as in ''E ...
(as in English ''singing'').
Due to problems with the display of this letter in phones and computers, it is sometimes replaced by a similar letter
Ŋ ŋ. Free fonts that display it correctly includ
Quivira Gentium and
Andika.
History
The letter appeared in late 1920s in the
New Turkic Alphabet, however it was borrowed by some other non-Turkic peoples of the
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
during the
Latinisation campaign. In the 1990s the letter was used in
Chechen Latin alphabet, in 2000s it was used in the Tatar Latin alphabet, both of them however are not in wide use now. In the Chechen alphabet the majuscule looked similar to minuscule, but has a larger size.
[Lepiev A.S., Lepiev İ.A., Türkçe-Çeçençe sözlük, Turkoyꞑ-noxçiyꞑ doşam, Ankara, 2003]
Unicode
In
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
, the letter is in the
Latin Extended-D block encoded at and .
See also
Similar Latin letters:
*
Ŋ ŋ
*
Ƞ ƞ
*
Ɲ ɲ
*
Ñ ñ
*
Ň ň
*
Ņ ņ
*
ɳ
*
ɱ
*
ᶇ
Similar Cyrillic letters:
*
Ӈ ӈ
*
Ң ң
*
Ӊ ӊ
*
Ҥ ҥ
*
Ԩ ԩ
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:N descender
Letters with descender (diacritic)
Latin-script letters