Agma

In linguistics and phonetics, agma (Greek), or eng, 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. 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/.