Ƞ

N with long right leg

N with long right leg

Obsolete IPA character


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 ƞ

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

  1. Lakota Dictionary, Sage and Sweetgrass, 2008
  2. New Lakota Dictionary Online, Lakota Language Consortium, 2008-2013

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