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 firs ...

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 ''Dania, Tidsskrift for folkemål ...

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 as ...

, where it may have represented a uvular

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. 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 ...

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

, 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. 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 Nationa ...

linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative (). Both and are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D; 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 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 standardized 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 dialects. It is very similar to other Central European transcription systems from the early 20th century. The base characters are mostly bas ...

phonetic transcription system uses .

References

* * Latin letters with diacritics Latin-script letters Phonetic transcription symbols {{Phonetics-stub

Transcription

Teuthonista

See also

References