Agma

In linguistics and phonetics, agma (Greek), eng, engwa (SAMPA: N), is the name for the consonant found in words such as ink and song. It is a velar nasal, and usually takes the place of /n/ before velar consonants, as in the first example. Many English words lost /g/, so /N/ became a 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/.