In phonetics, gemination happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Gemination is distinct from stress and may appear independently of it.
Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Arabic, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Classical Hebrew, Hungarian, Catalan, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Ganda and Russian. Most languages (including also English) do not have distinctive long consonants. Vowel length is distinctive in more languages than consonant length, although several languages feature both independently (as in Finnish), or have interdependent vowel and consonant length (as in Norwegian and Swedish).
Contents |
Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants, and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, delaying release. That is, the "hold" is lengthened. Long consonants are usually around one and a half or two times as long as short consonants, depending on the language.
In some languages, e.g., Italian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic and Ganda, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. That is, a short vowel within a stressed syllable almost always precedes a long consonant or a consonant cluster, whereas a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. In Classical Arabic, a long vowel was lengthened even more before permanently geminate consonants, this is no longer exhibited in varieties of colloquial Arabic or even MSA, however.
In other languages, such as Finnish, 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 Ganda, also have initial consonant length—in fact, initial consonant length is very common in Ganda and is used to indicate certain grammatical features. In spoken Finnish and in spoken Italian, long consonants are produced between words by sandhi effects.
Among stops and fricatives, in most languages only voiceless consonants occur geminated.
The reverse of gemination is the process in which a long consonant is reduced to a short one. This is called degemination. This is a pattern observed in Baltic-Finnic consonant gradation, where the strong grade (often, but not necessarily nominative) form of the word is degeminated into a weak grade (often all other cases) form of the word, e.g. taakka → taakan (burden, of the burden).
Arabic uses a diacritic shaped like a small written Latin "w" called shadda (شدة). It is written above the consonant which is to be doubled. It is the most common diacritic (ḥaraka) that is sometimes used in ordinary spelling to avoid ambiguity. Example: <ر> /rr/; مدرسة /madrasa/ school vs. مدرّسة /mudarrisa/ teacher (f.)
Danish has a three-way consonant length distinction. For instance:
The word 'bundene' can phonemically be analyzed as /bɔnənə/, with the middle schwa being assimilated to [n].
In English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive within root words. For instance, 'baggage' is pronounced /ˈbæɡɪdʒ/, not */bæɡːɪdʒ/. Phonetic gemination occurs marginally.
However, gemination does occur across words and across morphemes 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:
With affricates, however, this does not occur. For instance:
A minimal pair demonstrating gemination in English is "night train" versus "night rain".
In some dialects gemination is also found when the suffix -ly follows a root ending in -l or -ll, as in:
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" [ʌˈnːeɪmd], and "holy" [hoʊli] versus "wholly" [ˈhoʊlːi]. (The latter two are identical in many areas, however.)
In some varieties of Welsh English, the process takes place indiscriminately between vowels, e.g. in money [ˈmɜ.nːiː] but it also applies with graphemic duplication (thus, orthographically dictated), e.g. butter [ˈbɜt̚.tə][1]
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".
Consonant length is phonemic in Finnish: For example, takka [ˈtakːa] (transcribed with the length sign [ː] or with a doubled sign [ˈtakka]), 'fireplace', but taka [ˈtaka], 'back'.
In Ancient Greek, consonant length was distinctive, e.g., μέλω [mélɔː] "I am of interest" vs. μέλλω [mélːɔː] "I am going to".
The distinction has been lost in Modern Greek, except in dialects such as the Cypriot-Greek dialect spoken in Cyprus, in varieties of the Aegean sea and elsewhere.
In Hungarian, consonant length is phonemic, e.g. megy [mɛ͡ɟʝ], 'goes' and meggy [mɛ͡ɟʝː], 'sour cherry'.
In Standard Italian, consonant length is distinctive.[2] For example, "bevve" /'bevve/ ['bevve] means "he/she drank", while "beve" /'beve/ ['be:ve] means "he/she drinks/is drinking". Tonic syllables are bimoraic and are therefore composed of either a long vowel in an open syllable (beve) or a short vowel in a closed syllable (bevve). Double consonants occur not only within words but at word boundaries, where they are pronounced but not necessarily written: "chi + sa" = "chissà'" (who knows) [kis'sa] and "vado a casa" (I am going home) pronounced ['va:do ak'ka:sa]. See syntactic doubling (The last example refers to standard (Tuscan) and central-southern Italian).
In Japanese, consonant length is distinctive (as is vowel length). Gemination in the syllabary is represented with the sokuon, a small tsu: っ for hiragana in native words and ッ for katakana in foreign words. For example, 来た (きた, kita) means 'came; arrived', while 切った (きった, kitta) means 'cut; sliced'. バグ (bagu) means '(computer) bug', and バッグ (baggu) means 'bag'.
In Latin, consonant length was distinctive, as in anus "old woman" vs. annus "year". (Vowel length was also distinctive in Latin, but is not reflected in the orthography.) Gemination inherited from Latin still occurs in Italian and Catalan. It has been almost completely lost in French and completely in Romanian.
Ganda is unusual in that gemination can occur word-initially, as well as word-medially. For example kkapa /kːapa/ 'cat', /ɟːaɟːa/ jjajja 'grandfather' and /ɲːabo/ nnyabo 'madam' all begin with geminate consonants.
There are three consonants that cannot be geminated: /j/, /w/ and /l/. Whenever morphological rules would geminate these consonants, /j/ and /w/ are prefixed with /ɡ/, and /l/ changes to /d/. For example:
In Polish, consonant length is distinctive. For example,
Punjabi in its official script Gurmukhi uses a diacritic called an áddak ( ੱ ) (ਅੱਧਕ, IPA: [ə́dːək]) which is written above the word and indicates that the following consonant is geminate. Gemination is specially characteristic of Punjabi compared to other Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi-Urdu, where instead of the presence of consonant lengthening, the preceding vowel tends to be lengthened. Consonant length is distinctive in Punjabi, for example:
In Russian, consonant length (indicated with two letters, as in ванна [ˈvannə] 'bathtub') may occur in several situations.
In Ukrainian, geminates are found between vowels: багаття /bɑɦɑtʲːɑ/ 'bonfire', подружжя /pɔdruʒʲːɑ/ 'married couple', обличчя 'face'. Geminates also occur at the start of a few words: лляний /lʲːɑnɪj/ 'flaxen', forms of the verb лити 'to pour' (ллю /lʲːu/, ллєш /lʲːɛʃ/ etc.), ссати /sːɑtɪ/ 'to suck' and derivatives.
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. Word-initial and word-final stops never contrast for length.
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., penne [penːe] (a kind of pasta), though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying phonemic forms).
Doubled orthographic consonants do not always indicate a long phonetic consonant.
|
|||||||||||||||||