Learn English – Does English have digraph GN that does not come from Norman (Old French)

etymologyvocabulary

I noticed that in English the digraph GN appears in a strange way. Some examples I can find are the word stems -cogn-, -sign-, -lign-, all of which looks very similar to French counterparts. By this I think GN is of French origin, and should be borrowed into English as a result of the Norman conquest.

OTOH, in many words, GN is either pronounced separately or is at the beginning, which contradicts with the "French origin" hypothesis, because in French GN is pronounced like "ny" (e.g. canyon). And also note that this pronunciation is similar to other Germanic languages like German, but I can't find any similarity between a German word containing GN and an English -GN- word.

Words imported from Latin or Greek families via Old French after the Norman Conquest (1066 AD) might as well not be considered "native English", while I think Romance-originated words borrowed into Old English before that are probably fair game (but there probably aren't any with "gn").

Best Answer

At the start of words like gnaw

Yes, at the start of some words like gnaw. Even though the G in gnaw is “silent” in present-day English, it used to represent a consonant sound. So originally, the "GN" in this word wouldn't have been a "digraph" so much as a consonant cluster (albeit a special kind of consonant cluster: the sounds are "tautosyllabic" or in the same syllable). As the spelling suggests, the consonant cluster is thought to have originally been pronounced as [gn], although it may have developed other realizations in certain time periods.

The distinction in pronunciation between words starting with gn- and words starting with n- seems to have been lost sometime in the early Modern English time period (An Introduction to Early Modern English, by Terttu Nevalainen (2006), says the change of gn- to /n/ was "completed in the south in the eighteenth century", p. 128).

In the middle of some compound words like hangnail

There are also some compound words made from native elements that are spelled with -gn-, such as hangnail.

"G" itself isn't very frequent in non-word-initial position in native English vocabulary because of sound changes

The /g/ sound is a bit rare outside of word-initial position in native English vocabulary because it was historically vocalized in many contexts to /j/ or /w/.

The vocalization of G to /j/ (in palatalizing contexts) had already occurred by the time of Old English (at least, in West Saxon dialects), so the letter "G" in Old English spellings could represent the palatal glide /j/ (we have evidence for this from spellings that use G unetymologically to represent /j/ that did not originate from the Proto-Germanic *g sound; e.g. the word for year, cognate to German Jahr, was spelled with the letter G in old English). The Old English word regn that Laurel's answer mentions was probably pronounced something like /rejn/.

The vocalization of G to /w/, which occurred later, seems to have developed via rounding of earlier /ɣ/. An example is the Modern English word owner which the OED says had spellings like agenere, agnere, and ahnere in Old English. The Bosworth-Toller entry is at ágnere.

The pronunciation of "-gn-" as /gn/ is not inconsistent with Latin, or even French origins for a word

The pronunciation of -gn- as /gn/ in many Latinate words is based on spelling (and also partly on certain traditions for pronouncing Latin, which may have themselves have been based on spelling): it doesn't have much if anything to do with Germanic. Note that even though -gn- is pronounced as /ɲ/ most of the time in French words, there are actually some learned French words where /gn/ is used, such as ignition and stagnation.

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