Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and ŋ. It was originally used for a voiceless -like sound in Dania transcription of the Danish language (in Dania, it is considered a ligature of h and j).
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.
Heng has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a jocular phoneme in English, which includes both and as its allophones, to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. and are separate phonemes in English, even though no minimal pair for them exists due to their complementary distribution.
Heng is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative . Heng was also historically used in the IPA for this sound, and later a compromise form between the two symbols was used.
Variants and forms + Forms of heng 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. Form used in some Chechen and Ingush typefaces in the 1920s and 1930s.
Both and are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D; they were added with Unicode version 5.1 in April 2008. The superscript is in Latin Extended-E, added in Unicode 7.0 in June 2014. a proposed for remains unencoded.
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.
See also Ŋ ŋ – Latin letter Eng Ӈ ӈ – Cyrillic letter En with hook Unified Northern Alphabet
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Further reading