In
linguistics and
phonetics,
agma (
Greek), or eng, is the name for the consonant found in words such as i
nk and so
ng. It is a
velar nasal, and usually takes the place of /n/ before velar consonants, as in the first example. In many
English words, though, the combination ng has degenerated to a single agma, so that it is a
phoneme in its own right. In Greek it was written with a gamma γ (and still is), and it was probably an
allophone of /n/, as in Italian, Spanish and Modern Greek. In modern Germanic languages, it is a phoneme - originally, it was only an allophone in Germanic, too. Nevertheless, there is a
Runic letter that represents [N] (as the sound is symbolized in
SAMPA). In his book
Ancient Scripts And Phonological Knowledge, Miller argues that the Runic [N]-letter is composed of two gammas - however, two gammas never represented [N] in Greek, but [Ng]. In Latin, [N] was represented by N before C, G; and by G before N - AGNUS was pronounced /aNnus/.
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