Heng is a letter of the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
, 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 æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first li ...
of ''
h'' and ''
Å‹''. It is used for a voiceless ''y''-like sound, such as in
Dania transcription of the Danish language.
It was used word-finally in early transcriptions of
Mayan languages
The Mayan languagesIn 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 fricative
A fricative is a consonant manner of articulation, produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation, articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the ba ...
.
It is sometimes used to write
Judeo-Tat.
It has been occasionally used by
phonologists to represent a hypothetical
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
in
English, which includes both and as its
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
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 ...
s to distinguish phonemes. Normally and are considered separate phonemes in English, even though a minimal pair for them cannot be constructed, 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 e ...
.
It 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 Nationali ...
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 characters for phonetic, Mayanist, and Medieval
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, simi ...
; 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 in the
International Phonetic Alphabet.
is used as a
superscript IPA letter
Teuthonista
The
Teuthonista phonetic transcription system uses .
See also
*Ŋ ŋ –
Latin letter Eng
*Ӈ ӈ –
Cyrillic letter En with hook
*
Unified Northern Alphabet
References
*
*
Latin letters with diacritics
Latin-script letters
Phonetic transcription symbols
{{Phonetics-stub