Gemination
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- For another meaning, see Tooth gemination
In phonetics, gemination occurs when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant.
Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Finnish and Luganda. Most languages (including English) do not have distinctive long consonants.
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[edit] Gemination in phonetics
Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants, and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the "hold" is prolonged. Long consonants are usually around one and a half or two times as long as short consonants, depending on the language. Consonant length is phonemic in Italian: For example, penne [ˈpɛnne] (generally transcribed with the length sign IPA: [ː] as [ˈpɛnːe]), a type of pasta (see penne), but pene [ˈpene], plural of pena, "punishment".
In some languages, e.g. Swedish and Luganda, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. That is, a short vowel always precedes a long consonant, whereas a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant.
In other languages, such as Finnish or Japanese, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, both are phonemic, such that taka /taka/ "back", takka /takːa/ "fireplace", taakka /taːkːa/ "burden", and so forth are different, unrelated words; this distinction is traceable all the way back to Proto-Uralic. Finnish consonant length is also affected by consonant gradation. Another important phenomenon is that sandhi produces long consonants to word boundaries from an archiphonemic glottal stop, for example |otaʔ se| → /otasːe/ "take it!"
Distinctive consonant length is usually restricted to certain consonants. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among them are Pattani Malay, Chuukese, a few Romance languages such as Sicilian and Neapolitan, and many of the High Alemannic German dialects (such as Thurgovian). Some African languages, such as Setswana and Luganda, also have initial consonant length—in fact initial consonant length is very common in Luganda and is used to indicate certain grammatical features. In spoken Finnish, long consonants are produced between words by sandhi effects.
Among stops and fricatives, in most languages only voiceless consonants occur geminated.
[edit] In various languages
[edit] English
In English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive within root words. For instance, 'baggage' is pronounced /ˈbægɪdʒ/, not /bægːɪdʒ/. Phonetic gemination occurs marginally.
However, gemination does occur across words when the last consonant in a given word and the first consonant in the following word are the same fricative, nasal, or plosive. For instance :
- calm man [kɑːmˈːæn]
- this saddle [ðɪsˈːædəl]
- black coat [blækˈːoʊt]
- back kick [ˈbækːɪk]
With affricates, however, this does not occur. For instance :
- orange juice [ˈɒrɪndʒ dʒuːs]
In some dialects gemination is also found when the suffix -ly follows a root ending in -l or -ll, as in:
- solely [soʊlːi]
In most instances, the absence of this doubling does not affect the meaning, though it may confuse the listener momentarily. Notable examples where the doubling does affect the meaning are the pairs "unaimed" [ʌnˈeɪmd] versus "unnamed" [ʌnˈːeɪmd], and "holy" [hoʊli] versus "wholly" [ˈhoʊlːi]. (The latter two are identical in many areas, however.)
[edit] Estonian
Estonian has three phonemic lengths; however, the third length is a suprasegmental feature, which is as much tonal patterning as a length distinction. It is traceable to allophony caused by now-deleted suffixes, for example half-long linna < *linnan "of the city" vs. overlong linna < *linnahan "to the city".
[edit] Greek (Ancient)
In Ancient Greek, consonant length was distinctive. The distinction has been lost in Modern Greek except in a few dialects.
[edit] Hungarian
In Hungarian, consonant length is distinctive. For example megy means go, while meggy means sour cherry.
[edit] Japanese
In Japanese, consonant length is distinctive. For example, 来た(kita) means 'came; arrived', while 切った(kitta) means 'cut; sliced'.
[edit] Romanian
In Romanian, double consonant could appear in writing in following cases:
- In some interjection (real consonant lengthening): sst (equivalent to 'shut up!'), brr (expressing the coldness, fear, disgust)
- As a result of word formation (different syllables): înnăscut 'natural born', ohmmetru 'ohmmeter'
- In some borrowed words (but pronunciation is most often as a single consonant): andorran 'andorran', rrom 'gypsy'
[edit] Russian
In Russian, consonant length may occur in several ways.
- As a double consonant : ванна ([ˈvannə] 'bathtub')
- As a result of word formation or conjugation: длина ([dlʲinə] 'length') → длинный ([ˈdlʲnnɨj] 'long')
- As a result of phonological alternation:
- высший ([ˈvɨɕɕɨj] 'highest')
[edit] Wagiman
In Wagiman, an indigenous Australian language, consonant length in stops is the primary phonetic feature that differentiates fortis and lenis stops. Wagiman does not have phonetic voice. As consonantal length can only be contrastive between other segments, word-initial and word-final stops never contrast for length.
[edit] Writing
In written language, consonant length is often indicated by writing a consonant twice ("ss", "kk", "pp", and so forth), but can also be indicated with a special symbol, such as the shadda in Arabic, or sokuon in Japanese. Estonian uses 'b', 'd', 'g' for short consonants, and 'p', 't', 'k' and 'pp', 'tt', 'kk' are used for long consonants.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, long consonants are normally written using the triangular colon ː, e.g. [penːe], though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying phonemic forms).
In Hungarian, when two characters are put together to make a different sound, they are considered only one letter - for example, sz is one consonant that makes the sound [s] - a digraph. This is 'doubled' by writing ssz (rather than szsz), pronounced [sː]. The other digraphs cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, ty and zs work the same way: ccs, ddz, ggy, lly, nny, tty and zzs, respectively. The only Hungarian trigraph, dzs, can be geminated by ddzs. (B, c, d, etc. - 'bb', 'cc', 'dd', and so on.) The only digraph in Luganda, ny /ɲ/ is doubled in the same way: nny /ɲː/.
In Italian, the sound [kw] (represented by the letter Q) is always doubled by writing cq, except only in the word soqquadro where the letter Q is reduplicated.
Doubled orthographic consonants do not always indicate a long phonetic consonant. In English, for example, the [n] sound of "running" is not lengthened. Consonant digraphs are used in English to indicate the preceding vowel is a 'lax' vowel, while a single letter often allows a 'tense' vowel to occur. For example, "tapping" /tæpɪŋ/ (from "tap") has a "short A" /æ/, which is distinct from the diphthong "long A" /eɪ/ in "taping" /teɪpɪŋ/ (from "tape"). In Modern Greek, doubled orthographic consonants have no phonetic significance at all.
