gnatus.

From Proto-Italic *gnātos (“born; son”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵn̥h₁tós (“begotten; produced”), from *ǵenh₁- (“to produce, give birth, beget”). When used as a verb form, it functions as the perfect active participle of the deponent verb nāscor (“to be born”). The form *gnātos must have previously also served as the perfect passive participle of the transitive verb gignō (“to bear; to beget; to engender”), whose attested perfect passive participle genitus is a relatively recent replacement built by analogy to the stem of the perfect genuī. Continued association with the latter verb, and with other related words where initial /g/ was regularly retained due to a following vowel, such as genus (“birth, origin, lineage, descent”), could be part of the reason a spelling with gn- was used for this word for some time after regular sound change had generally replaced initial /ɡn-/ in Latin with /n-/. Another influence on the spelling could have been the medial -gn- found in related prefixed words such prōgnātus, cognātus. Alternatively, Köhm 1905 suggests that the relatively frequent occurrence of the noun after a possessive pronoun could have caused /ɡn/ to be retained just as it was in word-internal position.

From Proto-Italic *gnātos (“born; son”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵn̥h₁tós (“begotten; produced”), from *ǵenh₁- (“to produce, give birth, beget”). When used as a verb form, it functions as the perfect active participle of the deponent verb nāscor (“to be born”). The form *gnātos must have previously also served as the perfect passive participle of the transitive verb gignō (“to bear; to beget; to engender”), whose attested perfect passive participle genitus is a relatively recent replacement built by analogy to the stem of the perfect genuī. Continued association with the latter verb, and with other related words where initial /g/ was regularly retained due to a following vowel, such as genus (“birth, origin, lineage, descent”), could be part of the reason a spelling with gn- was used for this word for some time after regular sound change had generally replaced initial /ɡn-/ in Latin with /n-/. Another influence on the spelling could have been the medial -gn- found in related prefixed words such prōgnātus, cognātus. Alternatively, Köhm 1905 suggests that the relatively frequent occurrence of the noun after a possessive pronoun could have caused /ɡn/ to be retained just as it was in word-internal position.