N

N

N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet...

 with descender

Descender

In typography, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. The line that descenders reach down to is known as the beard line....

 (majuscule: , minuscule: ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

, used in several Uniform Turkic Alphabet

Uniform Turkic Alphabet

The Uniform Turkic Alphabet was a Latin alphabet used by non-Slavic peoples of the USSR in the 1930s. The alphabet used ligatures from Jaŋalif as it was also a part of the uniform alphabet. The uniform alphabet utilized Latin ligatures, excluding "w." Some additional ligatures were also introduced...

 orthographies in 1930s (for instance, Tatar

Tatar language

The Tatar language , or more specifically Kazan Tatar, is a Turkic language spoken by the Tatars of historical Kazan Khanate, including modern Tatarstan and Bashkiria...

 Jaꞑalif), as well as in the 1990s orthographies invented in attempts to restore the Latin alphabet for the Tatar language

Tatar language

The Tatar language , or more specifically Kazan Tatar, is a Turkic language spoken by the Tatars of historical Kazan Khanate, including modern Tatarstan and Bashkiria...

 and the Chechen language

Chechen language

The Chechen language is spoken by more than 1.5 million people, mostly in Chechnya and by Chechen people elsewhere. It is a member of the Northeast Caucasian languages.-Classification:...

.

In the majority of languages this letter represented a velar nasal

Velar nasal

The velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It 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....

 (as in English singing).

History

The letter appeared in late 1920s in the Uniform Turkic Alphabet

Uniform Turkic Alphabet

The Uniform Turkic Alphabet was a Latin alphabet used by non-Slavic peoples of the USSR in the 1930s. The alphabet used ligatures from Jaŋalif as it was also a part of the uniform alphabet. The uniform alphabet utilized Latin ligatures, excluding "w." Some additional ligatures were also introduced...

, however it was borrowed by some other non-Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 during the Latinisation

Latinisation (USSR)

In the USSR, latinisation was the name of the campaign during the 1920s-1930s which aimed to replace traditional writing systems for numerous languages with the Latin alphabet and to create for languages had no writing. Almost all Turkic, Iranian, Uralic and several other languages were romanized,...

 campaign. In the 1990s the letter was used in Chechen

Chechen language

The Chechen language is spoken by more than 1.5 million people, mostly in Chechnya and by Chechen people elsewhere. It is a member of the Northeast Caucasian languages.-Classification:...

 Latin alphabet, in 2000s it was used in the Tatar Latin alphabet, both of them however are not in wide use now. In the Chechen alphabet the majuscule looked similar to minuscule, but has a larger size.

Computer encoding

In Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

, it is in the Latin Extended-D range and it is encoded as U+A790 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH DESCENDER and U+A791 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH DESCENDER.

External links

• Quivira font. Currently one of the few that renders the letter correctly.