Gemination

In phonetics, gemination or consonant elongation 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. Gemination literally means "twinning", and is from the same Latin root as "Gemini".

Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Arabic, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Classical Hebrew, Hungarian, Catalan, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Russian, Slovak and Tamil. Most languages (including 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 Arabic, Japanese, Finnish, and Estonian), or have interdependent vowel and consonant length (as in Norwegian and Swedish).

Phonology

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; however, this is no longer exhibited in varieties of colloquial Arabic or even Modern Standard Arabic.

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. 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).

Examples

Arabic

Arabic uses a w-shaped diacritic called shadda ( ّ  ). 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: <<span=2 style="font-size: 13pt">ر> /r/; مدرسة /madrasa/ "school" vs. مدرّسة /mudarrisa/ "teacher (f.)"

Danish

Danish has a three-way consonant length distinction. For instance:

• bunde [b̥ɔnə] 'bottoms'
• bundne [b̥ɔnnə] 'bound' (pl.)
• bundene [b̥ɔnn̩nə] 'the bottoms'

The word 'bundene' can phonemically be analyzed as /bɔnənə/, with the middle schwa being assimilated to [n].

English

In English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive within root words. For instance, 'baggage' is pronounced /ˈbæɡɨdʒ/, not */bæɡːɨdʒ/. 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 stop. For instance:

• calm man [ˌkɑːmˈmæn]
• this saddle [ðɪsˈsædəl]
• midday [mɪddeɪ]
• lamppost ['læmppoʊst] (cf. lamb post, compost)
• cattail [ˈkætteɪl] (compare consonant length in "catfish")
• roommate ['rummeɪt]
• subbasement [ˌsʌbbeɪsmənt]

With affricates, however, this does not occur. For instance:

• orange juice [ˈɒrɪndʒ dʒuːs]

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:

• 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" [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

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".

Finnish

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'. Consonant gemination occurs with simple consonants (hakaa : hakkaa) and between syllables in the pattern (consonant)-vowel-sonorant-stop-stop-vowel (palkka), but not generally in codas or with longer syllables. (This occurs in Sami languages, so there is the name of Sami origin Jouhkki). Sandhi may also produce geminates. Consonant and vowel gemination are both phonemic and occur independently, e.g. Mali, maali, malli, maallinen (Mali (a Karelian surname), paint, model and secular, respectively). See Finnish phonology.

Greek

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 Standard Modern Greek and most varieties, with the exception of Cypriot such as in the pairs πολλοί [polˈli] 'a lot' vs. πολύ [poˈli] 'very'; the same is true for some varieties of the Aegean.

Hungarian

In Hungarian, consonant length is phonemic, e.g. megy [mɛɟ͡ʝ], 'goes' and meggy [mɛɟ͡ʝː], 'sour cherry'.

Italian

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).

Japanese

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'.

Korean

In Korean, geminates arise from assimilation, and they are distinctive.

Latin and Romance languages

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. It has been almost completely lost in French and completely in Romanian. In West Iberian languages, former Latin geminate consonants often evolved to new phonemes, including some lexicon with nasal vowels of Portuguese and Old Galician (that are partly of Celtic influence) as well as most Spanish /ɲ/ and /ʎ/, but phonetic length of both consonants and vowels is no longer distinctive.

Ganda

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:

• -ye /je/ 'army' (root) > ggye /ɟːe/ 'an army' (noun)
• -yinja /jiːɲɟa/ 'stone' (root) > jjinja /ɟːiːɲɟa/ 'a stone' (noun); jj is usually spelt ggy
• -wanga /waːŋɡa/ 'nation' (root) > ggwanga /ɡːwaːŋɡa/ 'a nation' (noun)
• -lagala /laɡala/ 'medicine' (root) > ddagala /dːaɡala/ 'medicine' (noun)

Polish

In Polish, consonant length is rare, but nevertheless distinctive. It occurs in words of more than one morpheme, where the final morpheme of the first part is the same as the initial morpheme of the second. For example,

• rodziny – 'families';rodzinny – adjective of 'family'
• saki - 'sacks, bags'; ssaki - 'mammals',
• leki [lɛki] – 'medicines'; lekki [lɛkːi] – 'light' (adjective referring to weight only)
• Grecy – 'Greeks' (noun); greccy [ɡrɛt͡st͡sɨ] – 'Greek' (adjective).

Punjabi

Punjabi in its official script Gurmukhi uses a diacritic called an áddak ( ੱ ) (ਅੱਧਕ, Punjabi pronunciation: [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:

• ਦਸ [d̪əs] – 'ten'; ਦੱਸ [d̪əsː] – 'tell' (verb)
• ਪਤਾ [pət̪a] – 'aware of something'; ਪੱਤਾ [pət̪ːa] – 'leaf'
• ਸਤ [sət̪] – 'truth' (liturgical); ਸੱਤ [sət̪ː] – 'seven'
• ਕਲਾ [kəla] – 'art'; ਕੱਲਾ [kəlːa] – 'alone'

Russian

In Russian, consonant length (indicated with two letters, as in ванна [ˈvannə] 'bathtub') may occur in several situations.

• Word formation or conjugation: длина ([dlʲɪˈna] 'length') > длинный ([ˈdlʲinnɨj] 'long') This occurs when two adjacent morphemes have the same consonant and is comparable to the situation of Polish described above.
• Assimilation. The spelling usually reflects the unassimilated consonants, but they are pronounced as a single long consonant.
  • высший ([ˈvɨʂːɨj] 'highest').^[3]

Ukrainian

In Ukrainian, geminates are found between vowels: багаття /bɑˈɦɑtʲːɑ/ "bonfire", подружжя /poˈdruʒʲːɑ/ "married couple", обличчя /obˈlɪt͡ʃʲːɑ/ "face". Geminates also occur at the start of a few words: лляний /lʲːɑˈnɪj/ "flaxen", forms of the verb лити "to pour" (ллю /lʲːu/, ллєш /lʲːɛʃ/ etc.), ссати /ˈsːɑtɪ/ "to suck" and derivatives. Gemination is in some cases semantically crucial; for example, різниця (rʲizˈnɪt͡sʲɑ) means "difference" while різниться (rʲizˈnɪt͡sʲːɑ) means "differs".

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. Word-initial and word-final stops never contrast for length.

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., penne [penːe] ('feathers', 'pens', also a kind of pasta), though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying phonemic forms).

• Catalan uses the raised dot (called an "interpunct") to distinguish a geminated l from a palatal ll.
  Thus, paral·lel ("parallel") and Llull .
• In Hungarian, digraphs (e.g. sz /s/) are geminated by doubling the first letter only, thus ssz (rather than szsz) /sː/. (For a complete list of Hungarian digraphs, see Hungarian orthography.)
• The only digraph in Ganda, ny /ɲ/ is doubled in the same way: nny /ɲː/.
• In Italian, geminated instances of the sound cluster [kw] (represented by the digraph qu) are always indicated by writing cq, except in the word soqquadro and beqquadro, where the letter Q is doubled. The gemination of sounds [ɲ], [ʃ] and [ʎ], (spelled gn, sc(i), and gl(i), respectively) is not indicated because these consonants are always geminated when occurring between vowels. Also the sounds [ʦ], [ʣ] (both spelled z) are always geminated when occurring between vowels, yet their gemination is sometimes shown, redundantly, by doubling the Z as, e.g., in pizza [ˈpiʦːa].
• In Swedish and Norwegian, the general rule is that a geminated consonant is written double, unless succeeded by another consonant. Hence hall ("hall"), but halt ("Halt!"). In Swedish, this does not apply to morphological changes (so kall, "cold" and kallt, "coldly" or compounds [so tunnbröd ("flatbread")]. The exception are some words ending in -m, thus hem ["home"] [but hemma ("at home")] and stam ["stem"], but lamm ["lamb", to distinguish the word from lam ("lame")], with a long /a/), as well as adjectives in -nn, so tunn, "thin" but tunt, "thinly" (whilst Norwegian has a rule always prohobiting two "m"s at the end of a word (with the exception being only a handful of proper names, and as a rule forms with suffixes reinsert the second "m", and the rule is that these word-final "m"s always cause the preceding vowel sound to be short (despite the spelling)).

Other representations of double letters

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 short (lax) vowel, while a single letter often allows a long (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 Standard Modern Greek, doubled orthographic consonants have no phonetic significance at all.
• Hangul (the Korean alphabet) and its romanizations also use double consonants, but to indicate "fortis" articulation, not gemination.

See also

• Syntactic doubling
• West Germanic gemination
• Glottal stop
• Length (phonetics)
• List of phonetic topics

References

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