Heng (letter)

Not to be confused with the Cyrillic letter Shha with hook.

Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and ŋ. It is used for a voiceless y-like sound,^{[clarification needed]} such as in Dania transcription of the Danish language.

Heng
Ꜧ ꜧ
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	Alphabetic
Language of origin	Unified Northern Alphabet
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]

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.

Transcription

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.^[3]

Teuthonista

The Teuthonista phonetic transcription system uses both heng and U+AB5C ꭜ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL HENG.^[4]

See also

• Ŋ ŋ – Latin letter Eng
• Ӈ ӈ – Cyrillic letter En with hook
• Unified Northern Alphabet