Is it true that Classical Latin words containing “gn” is pronounced as “ng”?
For example: signum (sin-gum).
Much Appreciated. 
Depending on where you look (and hear), some will give the pronunciation [g.n], as in English “significant”. Most others, however, render it as a velar nasal (like “ng” in English bang) followed by [n], and that is the one that seems more likely, and the one I use.
Thus, signum » [sing.num].
I’m not quite sure if “gn” represented solely the velar nasal, without the following [n], i.e. signum » [sing-um] (without actually pronouncing the “g”, though).
Varro talks about an addional character to the alphabet (in fact, an additional sound - the ancient did not distinguish sounds and letters) that the Greeks called agma. It was represented by ng in classical Latin but it was written - in Greek as well as in Old LAtin - as gg, e.g. siggulus, aggelus etc.
It is supposed, then, that the first sound in the ng was in fact a velar nasal, as in thing, and not a pure n. the theory is proposed by W.S.Allen in his Vox Graeca
How is this “ng” thought to have sounded during the time of Caesar and Cicero though?
I find that funny, but it’s true: I cannot really understand that proposed “-ng” sound. Is there somewhere I can hear it?
I can’t make sense of it, I cannot imagine how is this really pronounced. Maybe I also pronounce English wrongly, then, because I say “significant” as “sig-neef-cant”, and do not see any alteration in its “gn”.
In my opinion the following ‘n’ in addition to the velar nasal makes no sense. And it doesn’t resolve the “Gnaeus” problem."
Well, it’s not simply a theory; it’s a necessity. Latin n represents more than just the dental nasal, but also the velar and (rarer) palatal nasal, just as it is in English, Italian, German, ad infinitum. The Roman alphabet lacks special characters that differentiate, unlike the Sanskrit devanagari, for example. Take the English “anchor”: the “an-” is not pronounced as in the word “an,” but more like “ang” as in the “-ang” in “sang.” The exact same thing happens in the Italian word for “anchor,” ancora.
The reason that the Romans spelled their velar nasal “gn” was a simple matter of orthography: they didn’t have a letter to indicate the velar nasal, and so simply used what they had, an “n,” and used a “g” to mark the position of the ‘n’, of the nasal, at the velum, where the sound of ‘g’ is also made. The Germans did exactly the same thing, except they reversed the order: “ng” instead of “gn.”
I believe you mean to say gn not ng.
As for hearing it, I am trying to find a way of recording my own voice, for I would happily show you and everyone else.
I can’t make sense of it, I cannot imagine how is this really pronounced. Maybe I also pronounce English wrongly, then, because I say “significant” as “sig-neef-cant”, and do not see any alteration in its “gn”.
“significant” is pronounced “sig-nif-i-cant” (don’t forget the other short ‘i’ sound). Our English pronunciation of Latin is distinctly Germanic: the Germans pronounced Latin words as they saw them: they saw a ‘g’, and then an ‘n’, and pronounced them in that order. These harsh phonics are typical of German, but not of Latin. In any case, as far as English “gn” goes, I think you’re probably pronouncing that just fine.
I have recorded my voice pronouncing the following words:
magnus
magna
magnumsignum
signagnaeus
wav file here: http://myth.bungie.org/hosted/inmates/gn.wav
Enjoy!
Thanks for the sample, Luce Eques!
That explains a lot. Wow, it’s really a hard sound to describe.
It seems to me almost a ñ spanish sound, but with a “g” somewhere in it. It really seems to prolong its previous vowel, and nasalize it. then it appears to say “g” slightly and then the proper “n”.
That’s what I heard (I tried my best):
mãnus, mãga, mãnu, si(n)nu, singa, (g)naeus. I can bearly hear the “click” of the consonants in parentheses.
I find it really hard to pronounce.
Did you say your native language is Spanish, Cyborg?
Portuguese. I just used the “ñ” there because it’s more recognizable than the Portuguese way “nh”.
But when I wrote up what I heard in that last post I did use no “ñ”. I’m just stating that as (i think) it might come up wrong in some PC’s (the tilde might get above another letter). I’ve only used tildes above vowels there, and they meant only “nasalization”, not “ñ”.
Portuguese, as I recall, does not have the velar nasal; indeed, most Romance languages, ironically, lack this sound, and therefore have trouble at pronouncing the “ng” in “sing” and “king” and the like in languages like English and German; usually they simply drop the ‘g’. That explains your confusion, both in producing the sound and hearing it; indeed, if the gn of Latin truly is like the “ng” of English, and I believe it is, the pronunciation of many Latin words is counterintuitive for native English speakers as well (our language begins no word with the the velar nasal, except for gnome, for which most speakers don’t use a velar nasal, but a dental nasal — interestingly, “gnome” is a Latin word, from gnomus). It takes practice.
Luce, where are you getting your information? You are arguing as though you know as fact that Latin gn is pronounced as English ng, but everything I have ever read on the subject said it should be pronounced ngn. I have no problem pronouncing Gnaeus or gnosco or gnascor; as a matter of fact I find them a lot friendlier than such words as [size=150]πτερον[/size], [size=150]μνημη[/size], [size=150]κνημη[/size], etc. Simply by such Greek examples, I think your argument that a difficult string of consonants must really be standing for another sound is invalid by itself. English itself has far more difficult consonant patterns, but most of us are used to them (like the kstk sound in Textkit). Why was Gnaeus originally begun with a Cn if the first letter was not in fact a velar consonant? I have studied quite a bit about Latin pronunciation and I have not seen your approach before, so I would be interested to see where you found it or if you derived it yourself. This pronunciation would have some virtues to me (it would alleviate at least one mystery of the comparative degree) but I do need some proof.
Cyborg, I always find it interesting to hear how people learn English. I can’t believe you weren’t taught the -ng sound - English uses it with all present participles/gerunds and in quite a few other words. I seriously doubt anyone pronounces the word “gnome” any differently from “*nome” though.
Well, I think we do have it. In word like “banho” (bath), for example, which would be transliterated to spanish as baño. Is this it?
benissime, I must say I’m finding this rather amusing. 
I cannot see how is “ng” in “sing” any different from any other “ng” I’ve seen in English. Well, ok, maybe “bingo” has it differently, “longer” has it differently… maybe so does “exchanged”… I don’t know, it’s so subtle it’s driving me crazy! 
But I watch too much American-English-spoken TV and I really have a somewhat nice accent (or so everybody tells me), so this means I probably am not mispronouncing “sing” or “longer” - I just never really looked at them and noticed “oh, so there’s a difference between these two…”.
I actually learnt English in a very intensive way - I read (and still do read) too much English, I wrote it much too… And heard it and spoke it a lot, because teachers never speak Portuguese or let us do it in-class at good English schools.
I may not have the largest vocabulary I could have, but then again I don’t either in Portuguese (I like KIS - “keep it simple” at all times).
But to say the least I do have some sense of English idiomatic expressions - like “but then again”, for instance. I’ve read a couple of books on this subject.
<ñ> in Spanish is a palatal nasal, like in Italian and French. However, in Brazil (you’re Brazilian, right?), usually, though not always, tends to be pronounced differently, what to me sounds like a nasalized vowel, followed by /j/, or simply a nasalized /j/. In Portugal, the patalal nasal is, generally, always preserved. The thing is that in Portuguese it is difficult to isolate the velar nasal (“ng”) sound because vowels are nasalized before nasal consonants (in closed syllables, and in some regions, even in open syllabes). So while in Spanish it is easy note that the in “inglés” sounds different than that in “mentir”, in Portuguese, as you know, the is basically “lost”, having been absorved into the nasalization of the previous vowel. Nonetheless, with careful (and I mean, very careful!) analysis, one may hear a dental release in Portuguese “mentir”, so that a brief (very brief) is sounded, following the nasalized . The same with “inglês”, a brief velar nasal (that is, the being discussed) can be heard after the nasalized < i >. However, like I said, this requires careful examination, that speakers are highly unlikely to notice them.
Me too. I don’t have it at hand right now, but I recall that in the book “The Romance Languages”, in the section about Latin, this topic is discussed. The minimal pair “agnus” and “annus” is compared, each pronounced, respectively: /ang.nus/ and /annus/. The phonemic status of /ng/ is then dismissed on the basis that the velar nasal () in “agnus” is simply an assimilation of the due to the velar consonant (). The way I see it was used in opposition to , where the first one represented a velar nasal followed by , and the second one a velar nasal followed by . Therefore:
gn » /ng.n/
ng » /ng.g/
However, I don’t dismiss what Lucus says, as I’ve considered that as well.
So seems to have been a frequent sound, ocurring as well with before /k/. And, there’s also the hypothesis that /m/ in word-final position was pronounced as a velar nasal as well, e.g. filium /filiung/, etiam /etiang/ (which is exactly how this man pronounces them, and how I’m starting to pronounce them myself)
My Italian professor pronounced and separately, so that “singing” sounded like /sin.gin.g/. Especially in word-final position, one could clearly hear a after the .
Not at all; my theory is simply an opinion, as I’ve stated repeatedly:
indeed, if the > gn > of Latin truly is like the “ng” of English, and I believe it is,
but everything I have ever read on the subject said it should be pronounced ngn.
If I read the Latin of a Roman who explained as much, I will surely believe it. But until then it is merely philological theory, no? just as my own.
I have no problem pronouncing Gnaeus or gnosco or gnascor; as a matter of fact I find them a lot friendlier than such words as [size=150]πτερον[/size], [size=150]μνημη[/size], [size=150]κνημη[/size], etc.
I do not, personally; the first two for me are distinctly easier to render, while the last is on par with the “ngn” pronunciation of “Gnaeus.”
Simply by such Greek examples, I think your argument that a difficult string of consonants must really be standing for another sound is invalid by itself.
Not really. Indeed, in Latin, nc or ng is extremely different from a literal n + c or n + g. And the palatal ‘y’-sound that is made by consonantal Latin i is drastically different from the vowel i. They are related, and connected, but a poverty of alphabetical characters is a feature of nearly all languages, excepting for the most part Sanskrit. It’s an economy of letters.
English itself has far more difficult consonant patterns, but most of us are used to them (like the kstk sound in Textkit).
Except that each one of those consonants is not pronounced, not articulated clearly at all. Indeed, the consonants, when spoken at normal velocity and not enunciated for the virtue of spelling, largely lose their natural, unmitigated character, and together make a sound entirely different from a literal “kstk.” Such is the nature of our language. I do not disagree that there are plenty of difficult consonant patterns English, for there are, but Latin is not English.
Why was Gnaeus originally begun with a Cn if the first letter was not in fact a velar consonant?
Actually, the fact that the Romans lacked ‘g’ for some time and used ‘c’ in the manner you have above only vindicates my proposition. I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to say, but what I’m trying to say is that the (early) Romans understood, to some degree, that they had a sound — the velar nasal — which lacked a character in their writing system. ‘n’ was thus charged with taking on a double, even tripple role as a nasal from the dentals to the velars. The letter’s official pronunciation is dental, of course, but it is not denied by any of us here that it takes on a dynamic role in the course of the Latin language (i.e., “ancora,” “ingens,” et cetera). The ‘n’ may represent a velar nasal, therefore. However, presume that this sound, of the velar nasal, comes on its own, as I believe it does in the gn of Gnaeus. What is there to let the reader know that this is not a dental nasal, but a velar one? It seems that the solution was to add c before the ‘n’, a velar consonant to denote the velar nature of the nasal that was to be expressed, not to be pronounced separately on its own. And later with the invention of g, this letter took the place of the former, except in abbreviation of the above name. Thus to me it seems clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially since both velar consonants were employed in the job of “marking the velar,” as I have proposed, that my theory on this particular pronunciation is vindicated simply by the Roman orthographical convention.
I have studied quite a bit about Latin pronunciation and I have not seen your approach before, so I would be interested to see where you found it or if you derived it yourself.
I have derived it myself, as I always have said. Heck, you were present in the thread where I first proposed it, a long time ago.
This pronunciation would have some virtues to me (it would alleviate at least one mystery of the comparative degree) but I do need some proof.
I have none but for the proposals of philology. The reason that the “ngn” pronunciation for gn does not make sense to me is because it is two different nasals in succession, a velar nasal and then a dental nasal. As a solitary sound on its own, it seems unnecessary to me.
The other means we have for identifying the nature of gn in Latin is to see how it reacts in its daughter languages, such as Italian. In Italian, this spelling represents the palatal nasal “ñ,” as it is spelled in Spanish, and “nh” in Portuguese, as we have learned from our friend Cyborg. In Italian, numerous consonants which in Latin are velar are rendered palatal, such as ce and ci, possessing the Spanish or English “ch” sound, as in “church,” with ge and gi right along side them. With this trend in mind, we may reverse the linguistics of time, as it were, moving ce and ci in Italian back from the palate and returning them to the velum as they were in Latin. If we do the same thing for the gn of Italian, we arrive with the velar nasal. Therefore I believe that gn in Latin represents the velar nasal, alone.
Wow, that’s throughout right; you really know this well.
Luce Eques, I really respect the right you have to propose a hypothesis, just like any other person who is a language researcher. However, I guess that even if I agreed with your hypothesis, I couldn’t use it for I cannot pronounce it. 
Latin pronunciation is a very interesting subject that I should read more about. I find also fascinanting the way the romance languages have devoloped their own pronunciation, like for the sound -gn. Let me know a good textbook about Latin pronunciation, thanks.
My Italian professor pronounced and separately, so that “singing” sounded like /sin.gin.g/. Especially in word-final position, one could clearly hear a after the .
[/quote]
I wonder if the “clear” g you can hear at the end of the word really depends on lack of such a sound in Italian: that’s in part true of course. Italian alphabet is pretty “phonetic” and I find that some people tend to make mistakes just reading English like it was Italian. I make such mistakes sometimes, especially with new words. I believe that English and Italian are phonetically pretty different, that’s why English speakers of Italian (and probably also Italian speakers of English) tend to have a strong accent/intonation. Anyway I am not a linguist, so I could be wrong, feel free to correct me. 
I think Sidney Allen’s “Vox Latina”. I only “think” because I’m about to receive the one I bought, so I really haven’t checked it out yet. I wonder what does it say about the “gn” issue.
This could well be an artefact of where he or she learned English or resided. It is a feature of certain Northern (England) accents.
No. Or rather, that depends on how you’re using the word theory. The ‘merely’ philological theory has a wider base of evidence.
(I will represent the ‘ng’ sound of ‘sing’ with an upper case ‘N’. Not everyone will have the Unicode IPA font.)
A few more points in support of the -gn- = /Nn/ pronunciation.
1. Epigraphic evidence. Among alternate early spellings we see SINNU ‘signum’ and, SINGNIFER ‘signifer’. The latter type especially, with the duplication of ‘n’, points to /Nn/.
The other means we have for identifying the nature of > gn > in Latin is to see how it reacts in its daughter languages, such as Italian.
2. Daughter Languages, such as Romanian. The Romanian reflex of Latin -gn- is -mn-, limn < lignum. In fact, all velar+dental stop combintations became labial+dental (faptu < factum), and -mn- from /Nn/ would parallel that.
Edit: Oops, forgot to cite: Sihler, Section 220.