In Wikipedia, the letter Ng
is listed as one of the 28 letters of the Filipino alphabet. However, when I click on the link to go to Ng
's page, I get to a list of digraphs. I'm not a linguist, but as far as I know a digraph is a sequence of two letters whose pronunciation is different from the 'regular' sound of the sequence of the two, e.g sh
in English or sch
in German.
So what is the difference between Ng
as a letter or a digraph in this regard? I'm trying to find Ng
's Unicode number, but to no avail. Aren't letters (as opposed to, perhaps, digraphs) expected to have a Unicode number? Especially letters from languages as widely spoken as Filipino/Tagalog.
sh
, forth
... or forng
in English (also used to spell a unique sound)! I suspect -- but am not familiar enough with Filipino to make this an answer -- that "letter" is just being used loosely in the article. It would be interesting to see if official documents referred to that digraph as a "letter". (But either way I don't think Unicode would have a separate entity for things possible to type separately, whose ligatures can be defined by the font if needed.)