N with long right leg

N with long right leg (majuscule: Ƞ, minuscule: ƞ) is an obsolete letter of the Latin alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is encoded in Unicode as U+0220 Ƞ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH LONG RIGHT LEG and U+019E ƞ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH LONG RIGHT LEG.

⟨Ƞ⟩ was used to represent the nasalization of vowels in the Lakota language^[1] in that language's 1982 orthography.^[2] Later Lakota orthography replaced the letter with ⟨ŋ⟩,^[3] a more common letter that represents a velar nasal sound in many languages.

In the IPA, the letter ⟨ƞ⟩ was used from 1951 to 1976 to transcribe a moraic nasal homorganic with a following consonant, but was removed because it did not indicate a specific phonetic pronunciation and the IPA consists of only glyphs with defined phonetic values. The wildcard letter capital N is often used for something similar today.

⟨Ƞ⟩ is not to be confused with ⟨ŋ⟩ or with ⟨ɳ⟩, the latter used in the IPA for a retroflex nasal. The lowercase form is graphically similar to the lowercase Greek letter eta, ⟨η⟩.

References

This page was last edited on 19 May 2024, at 09:56