Heng (letter)
Letter of the Latin alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and ŋ. It was originally used for a voiceless [j]-like sound in Dania transcription of the Danish language (in Dania, it is considered a ligature of h and j).
| Heng | |
|---|---|
| Ꜧ ꜧ | |
| |
.svg) | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Latin script |
| Type | Alphabetic |
| Language of origin | Unified Northern Alphabet |
| Sound values | |
| In Unicode | U+A726,U+A727 |
Heng 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.[citation needed]
Heng has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a jocular phoneme in English, which includes both [h] and [ŋ] as its allophones, to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. /h/ and /ŋ/ are separate phonemes in English, even though no minimal pair for them exists due to their complementary distribution.[1]
Heng is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative [ɮ].[2] Heng was also historically used in the IPA for this sound, and later a compromise form between the two symbols ⟨.svg){kind=small}
⟩ was used.
Variants and forms
| Majuscule | Minuscule | Description |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
Forms with an uppercase based on H |
 |
Forms with the stem, bowl and loop based on the lowercase form; used in the Unified Northern Alphabet and some other Latin alphabets of the Soviet Union.[3] | |
.svg){kind=small} |
.svg){kind=small} |
Form used in some Chechen and Ingush typefaces in the 1920s and 1930s. |
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. The superscript U+AB5C ꭜ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL HENG is in Latin Extended-E, added in Unicode 7.0 in June 2014. As of 2026,[update] a proposed latin capital letter enlarged small heng for remains unencoded.
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.[4]
