Consonant length
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In phonetics, consonant length is 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 and Finnish. Most languages (including English) do not have distinctive long consonants. 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".
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[edit] Consonant length in phonetics
Lengthened fricatives, nasals, 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.
[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 small tsu 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'. This can be 'doubled' by writing ssz, not szsz. 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.)
Long consonants can also be a spelling phenomenon, as in English words like "running" where there is no lengthening of the consonant in actual speech. However, 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").
[edit] In English
In the English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive. Phonetic gemination occurs marginally. It is often found where a root-word is preceded by another root or a prefix ending with the same letter or sound that the second root begins with. Examples: "homemade", "screenname", "flat-top", "misspell", "unknown", "innumerable", "still-life". In some dialects it is also found when the suffix -ly follows a root ending in -l or -ll, for example: "fully", "evilly", "dully", "foully . In all dialects it also occurs over word boundaries: "I'll learn", "some money", "with them".
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" versus "unnamed", and "holy" versus "wholly" (the latter two sounding identical in many areas however).
[edit] In other languages
In Russian language, consonant length may occur in several ways.
- As a double consonant : Vanna (bathtub)
- As a result of word formation or conjugation: dlina->dlinny (length->long)
- As a result of phonological alternation:
In some languages, e.g. Swedish and Italian, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. That is, a short vowel must be followed by a long consonant, whereas a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. Consonant length is phonemic in Italian, e.g. penne [ˈpen.ne], a type of pasta (see penne), but pene [ˈpɛːne] "penis"; and the same is true of Swedish. Luganda has exactly the same rule.
In other languages, such as Finnish or Japanese, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, consonant length is phonemic, such that taka "back", takka "fireplace", taakka "burden", and so forth are different, unrelated words; this distinctinction is traceable all the way back to Proto-Finno-Ugric. 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 ota' se → otas_se "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.
In Hungarian, consonant length is distinctive. For example megy means go, while meggy means sour cherry.
In Ancient Greek, consonant length was distinctive. The distinction has been lost in Modern Greek except in a few dialects.
