Χαί?ετε!
I’ve been wondering what the final verdict was on the pronuntiation of γ + ν — I believe Allen in Vox Graeca says they are discrete, and not like Latin’s ‘gn’ where the ‘g’ in æquivalent to the ‘ng’ in “hang.” Τί οὖν νομίζετε;
Well, I’m not certain any final verdict was reached. I’m inclined to follow Allen, since there is little evidence pointing to [Nn] for -γν-, unlike [Nm] for -γμ-, for which there are several lines of argument.
Thanks, Will; then I’ll apply [gn] until further notice. After all, Greek has even more difficult combinations: πτ, πν, φθ, among others. By the way, is there ever a recognised schwa sound between such consonants in verse, another syllable in short? I’ve heard that the nasals can act as vowels, such as in the initial μν.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml version="1.0"?>
Well that’s good to know. I heard the vowel-nasal thing a year ago in my Greek class in Florence – he must have been talking about etymology. Καλῶς οὖν.
iustin: it may be too intolerably pedantic. glides are resonants, but by definition they’re not syllabic. if they were, they wouldn’t be glides, eh? or do you have an example?
Of course I do. A syllabic “y” is “i” and a syllabic “w” is “u”. They could just as easily be written with a circle under them as the syllabic nasals and liquids are but since we have those letters to write them with, we use them 
.
Remember that in PIE as traditionally reconstructed, “i” and “u” aren’t really party of the inventory of vowels. They are merely the syllabic reflexes of the glides and behave in precisely the same way, and in precisely the same environments, as the other resonants. When I say they are not part of the inventory of vowels I mean for instance that you will never find a PIE root whose vowel is “i” or “u”. The root will always have a vowel as its core, and that vowel is virtually always the ablauting vowel e/o (there has been a lot of controversy over whether “a” was really a vowel, and even if it was, it was extremely rare: what shows up as “a” in the daughter languages is usually “e” coloured by one of the laryngeals). If the root has a resonant as one of its consonants, then that resonant will become syllabic when the core vowel is in its zero-grade. It’s that simple, and the rule applies to the glides as well as to the other resonants.
On reflection, I realize that I overstated the case that “i” and “u” weren’t really vowels in PIE, but were simply syllabic reflexes of two of the resonants and on a par with syllabic versions of n, m, l, and r. Although I still think that there were no nominal or verbal roots whose only vowel was “i” or “u”, it is the case that there were some words that had no ablauting core vowel (“e/o”), such as *kwis, the etymon of Latin quis and Greek τίς. So although I still think that their status as vowels in PIE was marginal (like “a”), they clearly had some status as vowels (unless you want to believe that kwis was a root whose core vowel was always in zero grade).
I just think of resonants as essentially consonants which, in certain environments, can act as vowels, as long as we understand “vowel” to refer to the peak of a syllable.