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The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N.
Features Features of the velar nasal: The IPA symbol is a lowercase letter n with a leftward tail protruding from the bottom of the right stem of the letter. Compare n and . Both the symbol and the sound are commonly called as "eng" or "engma" and sometimes in reference to Greek, "agma". The symbol should not be confused with , the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem or with , the symbol for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem. Varieties of [ŋ] In English language|English In English, the velar nasal can occur in two positions: In other languages The ŋ sound is a fairly common sound cross-linguistically. It is unusual in that in many languages it is only permitted in postvocalic positions (after vowels), like in English, other European languages generally, Mandarin Chinese, and Korean. However, in other languages it is permitted at the beginnings of syllables and so may occur word-initially, as can be seen in the name of the language Ngaju Dayak. In Cantonese Chinese, not only is it permitted at the beginning of syllables, but it can be a standalone syllable itself. For instance, the surname Ng (sometimes transliterated as Eng) is a common Cantonese surname and is pronounced (呉). In Ancient Greek, before /k/ and /g/, it was written with a gamma γ (which was otherwise used for /g/) and it was probably an allophone of /n/, as in Italian, Spanish and Modern Greek. In modern Germanic languages, it is a separate phoneme — originally, it was only an allophone in Germanic, too. Nevertheless, there is a Runic letter that represents ŋ. In his book Ancient Scripts And Phonological Knowledge, Gary D. Miller argues that the Runic ŋ-letter is composed of two gammas. Two gammas didn't represent ŋ in Greek, but , but it's plausible that this was the source since Greek didn't have a separate letter for simple ŋ. In Latin, was represented by n before c, g; and by g before n; thus, agnus was pronounced . In Northern Sami, is represented by the letter ŋ. In Finnish, 'nk' represents while 'ng' represents the geminated . There is no in 'ng'. For example, lanka vs. langan vs. lannan . In Norwegian, 'nk' represents while 'ng' (mostly) represents (like in lang 'long'). But in some words 'ng' represents (like in tango 'tango'). In Galician is represented by the digraph nh. In Slavic languages it is occasionally an allophone of before k and g but this isn't always the case. Examples: banka (or ), bingo (or ). See also | |||||||||||||||||||
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