HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

In
phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...
and
phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant.William Ham, ''Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing'', p. 1–18 Some phonological theories use 'doubling' as a synonym for gemination, while others describe two distinct phenomena. Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Japanese. Other languages, such as
Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates. Consonant gemination and
vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...
are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Hungarian, Malayalam, and Finnish; however, in languages like Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish, vowel length and consonant length are interdependent. For example, in Norwegian and Swedish, a geminated consonant is always preceded by a short vowel, while an ungeminated consonant is preceded by a long vowel.


Phonetics

Lengthened
fricatives A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
, nasals, laterals,
approximants Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produ ...
and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, which delays release, and the closure is lengthened. That is, is pronounced , not *. In
affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...
s, it is also the closure that is lengthened, not the fricative release. That is, is pronounced , not *. In terms of consonant duration, Berber and Finnish are reported to have a 3-to-1 ratio, compared with around 2-to-1 (or lower) in Japanese, (URL is author's "near final version" draft) Italian, and Turkish.


Phonology

Gemination of consonants is distinctive in some languages and then is subject to various phonological constraints that depend on the language. In some languages, like Italian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic, and
Luganda Ganda or Luganda ( ; ) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 5.56 million Ganda people, Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, includ ...
, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. A short vowel within a stressed syllable almost always precedes a long consonant or a consonant cluster, and a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. In
Classical Arabic Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic () is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad Caliphate, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, e ...
, a
long vowel In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many languages do not d ...
was lengthened even more before permanently-geminate
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
s. In other languages, such as Finnish, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, both are phonemic; 'back', 'fireplace' and 'burden' are different, unrelated words. Finnish consonant length is also affected by
consonant gradation Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation (mostly lenition but also assimilation) found in some Uralic languages, more specifically in the Finnic, Samic and Samoyedic branches. It originally arose as an allophonic alternation ...
. Another important phenomenon is
sandhi Sandhi ( ; , ) is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function o ...
, which produces long consonants at word boundaries when there is an archiphonemic
glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...
> 'take it ( imperative)!'. In addition, in some Finnish compound words, if the initial word ends in an , the initial consonant of the following word is geminated: 'trash bag' , 'welcome' . In certain cases, a after a is geminated by most people: 'screw' , 'baby' . In the
Tampere Tampere is a city in Finland and the regional capital of Pirkanmaa. It is located in the Finnish Lakeland. The population of Tampere is approximately , while the metropolitan area has a population of approximately . It is the most populous mu ...
dialect, if a word receives gemination of after , the is often deleted ( , ), and 'Saturday', for example, receives a medial , which can in turn lead to deletion of (). Distinctive consonant length is usually restricted to certain consonants and environments. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among those that do are Pattani Malay, Chuukese,
Moroccan Arabic Moroccan Arabic ( ), also known as Darija ( or ), is the dialectal, vernacular form or forms of Arabic spoken in Morocco. It is part of the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum and as such is mutually intelligible to some extent with Algerian ...
, a few
Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...
such as Sicilian and Neapolitan, as well as many
High Alemannic German High Alemannic is a branch of Alemannic German spoken in the westernmost Austrian state of Vorarlberg and in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Intelligibility of these dialects to non-Alemannic speakers tends to be limited. Language area The High ...
dialects, such as that of Thurgovia. Some African languages, such as Setswana and
Luganda Ganda or Luganda ( ; ) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 5.56 million Ganda people, Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, includ ...
, also have initial consonant length: it is very common in Luganda and indicates certain
grammatical In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the goal of which is to formu ...
features. In colloquial Finnish and
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
, long consonants occur in specific instances as sandhi phenomena. The difference between singleton and geminate consonants varies within and across languages.
Sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels a ...
s show more distinct geminate-to-singleton ratios while
sibilant Sibilants (from 'hissing') are fricative and affricate consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English w ...
s have less distinct ratios. The bilabial and alveolar geminates are generally longer than velar ones. The reverse of gemination reduces a long consonant to a short one, which is called ''degemination''. It is a pattern in Baltic-Finnic
consonant gradation Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation (mostly lenition but also assimilation) found in some Uralic languages, more specifically in the Finnic, Samic and Samoyedic branches. It originally arose as an allophonic alternation ...
that the strong grade (often the
nominative In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or (in Latin and formal variants of E ...
) form of the word is degeminated into a weak grade (often all the other cases) form of the word: > (burden, of the burden). As a historical restructuring at the phonemic level, word-internal long consonants degeminated in Western Romance languages: e.g. Spanish /ˈboka/ 'mouth' vs. Italian /ˈbokka/, both of which evolved from Latin /ˈbukka/.


Examples


Afroasiatic languages


Arabic

Written
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
indicates gemination with a diacritic ( ) shaped like a lowercase Greek
omega Omega (, ; uppercase Ω, lowercase ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and last letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numerals, Greek numeric system/isopsephy (gematria), it has a value ...
or a rounded Latin ''w'', called the : . Written above the consonant that is to be doubled, the is often used to disambiguate words that differ only in the doubling of a consonant where the word intended is not clear from the context. For example, in Arabic, Form I verbs and Form II verbs differ only in the doubling of the middle consonant of the triliteral root in the latter form, ''e. g.'', (with full diacritics: ) is a Form I verb meaning ''to study'', whereas (with full diacritics: ) is the corresponding Form II verb, with the middle consonant doubled, meaning ''to teach''.


Berber

In
Berber Berber or Berbers may refer to: Ethnic group * Berbers, an ethnic group native to Northern Africa * Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages Places * Berber, Sudan, a town on the Nile People with the surname * Ady Berber (1913–196 ...
, each consonant has a geminate counterpart, and gemination is lexically contrastive. The distinction between single and geminate consonants is attested in medial position as well as in absolute initial and final positions. * 'say' * 'those in question' * 'earth, soil' * 'loss' * 'mouth' * 'mother' * 'hyena' * 'he was quiet' * 'pond, lake, oasis' * 'brown buzzard, hawk' In addition to lexical geminates, Berber also has phonologically-derived and morphologically-derived geminates. Phonological alternations can surface by concatenation (e.g., 'give him two!') or by complete assimilation (e.g. 'he will touch you'). Morphological alternations include imperfective gemination, with some Berber verbs forming their imperfective stem by geminating one consonant in their perfective stem (e.g., 'go! PF', 'go! IMPF'), as well as quantity alternations between singular and plural forms (e.g., 'hand', 'hands').


Austronesian languages

Austronesian languages The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken ...
in the
Philippines The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...
,
Micronesia Micronesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, consisting of approximately 2,000 small islands in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. It has a close shared cultural history with three other island regions: Maritime Southeast Asia to the west, Poly ...
, and
Sulawesi Sulawesi ( ), also known as Celebes ( ), is an island in Indonesia. One of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and the List of islands by area, world's 11th-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Min ...
are known to have geminate consonants.Blust, Robert. (2013). ''The Austronesian Languages (Rev. ed.)''. Australian National University.


Kavalan

The Formosan language Kavalan makes use of gemination to mark intensity, as in 'bad' vs. 'very bad'.


Malay dialects

Word-initial gemination occurs in various Malay dialects, particularly those found on the east coast of the
Malay Peninsula The Malay Peninsula is located in Mainland Southeast Asia. The landmass runs approximately north–south, and at its terminus, it is the southernmost point of the Asian continental mainland. The area contains Peninsular Malaysia, Southern Tha ...
such as Kelantan-Pattani Malay and
Terengganu Malay Terengganu Malay (; Terengganu Malay: ) is a Malayic languages, Malayic language spoken in the Malaysian state of Terengganu all the way southward to coastal Pahang and northeast Johor. It is the native language of Terengganuan Malays, Terengganu ...
. Gemination in these dialects of Malay occurs for various purposes such as: * To form a shortened free variant of a word or phrase so that: ** > 'give' ** > 'to/at/from the shore' * A replacement of
reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...
for its various uses (e.g. to denote plural, to form a different word, etc.) in Standard Malay so that: ** > 'children' ** > 'kite'


Tuvaluan

The
Polynesian language The Polynesian languages form a genealogical group of languages, itself part of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family. There are 38 Polynesian languages, representing 7 percent of the 522 Oceanic languages, and 3 percent of the Austr ...
Tuvaluan allows for word-initial geminates, such as 'overcooked'.


Indo-European languages


English

In
English phonology English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of Eng ...
, consonant length is not distinctive within
root word A root (also known as a root word or radical) is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. Th ...
s. For instance, ''baggage'' is pronounced , not . However, phonetic gemination does occur marginally. Gemination is found 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 A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
,
nasal Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination: * With reference to the human nose: ** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery * ...
, or stop. For instance: * b: ''subbasement'' * d: ''midday'' * f: ''life force'' * g: ''egg girl'' * k: ''bookkeeper'' * l: ''wholly'' (compare ''holy'') * m: ''calm man'' or ''roommate'' (in some dialects) or ''prime minister'' * n: ''evenness'' * p: ''lamppost'' (compare ''lamb post'', ''compost'') * r: ''interregnum'' or ''fire road'' * s: ''misspell'' or ''this saddle'' * sh: ''fish shop'' * t: ''cat tail'' * th: ''both thighs'' * v: ''live voter'' * z: ''pays zero'' With
affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...
s, however, this does not occur. For instance: * ''orange juice'' In most instances, the absence of this doubling does not affect the meaning, though it may confuse the listener momentarily. The following
minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate t ...
s represent examples where the doubling ''does'' affect the meaning in most accents: * ''ten nails'' versus ''ten ales'' * ''this sin'' versus ''this inn'' * ''five valleys'' versus ''five alleys'' * ''his zone'' versus ''his own'' * ''mead day'' versus ''me-day'' * ''unnamed'' versus ''unaimed'' * ''forerunner'' versus ''foreigner'' Note that whenever appears (in brackets), non-rhotic dialects of English don't have the gemination, but rather lengthen the preceding vowel. In some dialects gemination is also found for some words when the suffix ''-ly'' follows a root ending in -l or -ll, as in: * ''solely'' but not * ''usually'' In some varieties of
Welsh English Welsh English comprises the dialects of English spoken by Welsh people. The dialects are significantly influenced by Welsh language, Welsh grammar and often include words derived from Welsh. In addition to the distinctive words and grammar, ...
, the process takes place indiscriminately between vowels, e.g. in ''money'' but it also applies with graphemic duplication (thus, orthographically dictated), e.g. ''butter''


French

In French, gemination is usually not phonologically relevant and therefore does not allow words to be distinguished: it mostly corresponds to an accent of insistence ( realised ), or meets hyper-correction criteria: one "corrects" one's pronunciation, despite the usual phonology, to be closer to a realization that one imagines to be more correct: thus, the word ''illusion'' is sometimes pronounced by influence of the spelling. However, gemination is distinctive in a few cases. Statements such as ('she said') ~ ('she said it') ~ can commonly be distinguished by gemination. In a more sustained pronunciation, gemination distinguishes the conditional (and possibly the future tense) from the imperfect: 'would run' vs. 'ran' ; or the indicative from the subjunctive: 'we believe' vs. 'we believed' .


Greek

In
Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...
, consonant length was distinctive, e.g., 'I am of interest' vs. 'I am going to'. The distinction has been lost in the standard and most other varieties, with the exception of Cypriot (where it might carry over from Ancient Greek or arise from a number of synchronic and diachronic assimilatory processes, or even spontaneously), some varieties of the southeastern Aegean, and
Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...
.


Hindustani

Gemination is common in both
Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...
and
Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...
. It does not occur after long vowels and is found in words of both Indic and Arabic origin, but not in those of Persian origin. In Urdu, gemination is represented by the
Shadda Shaddah ( , , also called by the verbal noun from the same root, tashdid ) is one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, indicating a geminated consonant. It is functionally equivalent to writing a consonant twice in the orthograp ...
diacritic, which is usually omitted from writings, and mainly written to clear ambiguity. In Hindi, gemination is represented by doubling the geminated consonant, enjoined with the
Virama Virama ( ्, ) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either # halanta, hasanta or explicit vir ...
diacritic.


=Aspirated consonants

= Gemination of aspirated consonants in Hindi are formed by combining the corresponding non-aspirated consonant followed by its aspirated counterpart. In vocalised Urdu, the
shadda Shaddah ( , , also called by the verbal noun from the same root, tashdid ) is one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, indicating a geminated consonant. It is functionally equivalent to writing a consonant twice in the orthograp ...
is placed on the unaspirated consonant followed by the short vowel diacritic, followed by the '' do-cashmī hē'', which aspirates the preceding consonant. There are few examples where an aspirated consonant is truly doubled.


Italian

Italian is notable among the
Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...
for its extensive geminated consonants. In Standard Italian, word-internal geminates are usually written with two consonants, and geminates are distinctive. For example, , meaning 'he/she drank', is phonemically and pronounced , while ('he/she drinks/is drinking') is , pronounced . Tonic syllables are bimoraic and are therefore composed of either a long vowel in an open syllable (as in ) or a short vowel in a closed syllable (as in ). In varieties with post-vocalic weakening of some consonants (e.g. → 'reason'), geminates are not affected ( → 'May'). Double or long consonants occur not only within words but also at word boundaries, and they are then pronounced but not necessarily written: + = ('who knows') and ('I am going home') . All consonants except can be geminated. This word-initial gemination is triggered either lexically by the item preceding the lengthening consonant (e.g. by preposition 'to, at' in 'homeward' but not by definite article in 'the house'), or by any word-final stressed vowel ([] 's/he spoke French' but [] 'I speak French').


Latin

In Latin, consonant length was distinctive, as in 'old woman' vs. 'year'.
Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...
was also distinctive in Latin until about the fourth century, and was reflected in the orthography with an
apex The apex is the highest point of something. The word may also refer to: Arts and media Fictional entities * Apex (comics) A-Bomb Abomination Absorbing Man Abraxas Abyss Abyss is the name of two characters appearing in Ameri ...
. Geminates inherited from Latin still exist in
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
, in which and contrast with regard to and as in Latin. 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 instances of
nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are p ...
s in Portuguese language, Portuguese and Old Galician language, Galician as well as most cases of and in Spanish, but phonetic length of both consonants and vowels is no longer distinctive.


Nepali

In Nepali, all consonants have geminate counterparts except for . Geminates occur only medially. Examples: * – 'equal' ; – 'honour' * – 'disturb!' ; – 'authority' * – 'cook!' ; – 'certain'


Norwegian

In Norwegian, gemination is indicated in writing by double consonants. Gemination often differentiates between unrelated words. As in Italian, Norwegian uses short vowels before doubled consonants and long vowels before single consonants. There are qualitative differences between short and long vowels: * / – 'method' / 'must' * / – 'to search' / 'to take off' * / – 'theirs' / 'anger'


Polish

In Polish, consonant length is indicated with two identical letters. Examples: * – 'bathtub' * * – 'horror' * or – 'hobby' Consonant length is distinctive and sometimes is necessary to distinguish words: * – 'families'; – 'familial' * – 'sacks, bags'; – 'mammals', * – 'medicines'; – 'light, lightweight' Double consonants are common on morpheme borders where the initial or final sound of the suffix is the same as the final or initial sound of the stem (depending on the position of the suffix), after
devoicing In phonology, voicing (or sonorization) is a sound change where a voiceless consonant becomes voiced due to the influence of its phonological environment; shift in the opposite direction is referred to as devoicing or surdization. Most commonl ...
. Examples: * – 'before, previously'; from (suffix 'before') + (archaic 'that') * – 'give back'; from (suffix 'from') + ('give') * – 'swampy'; from ('swamp') + (suffix forming adjectives) * – 'brightest'; from (suffix forming superlative) + ('brighter')


Punjabi

Punjabi is written in two scripts, namely,
Gurmukhi Gurmukhī ( , Shahmukhi: ) is an abugida developed from the Laṇḍā scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504–1552). Commonly regarded as a Sikh script, Gurmukhi is used in Punjab, India as the official scrip ...
and
Shahmukhi Shahmukhi (, , , ) is the right-to-left abjad-based script developed from the Perso-Arabic alphabet used for the Punjabi language varieties, predominantly in Punjab, Pakistan. It is generally written in the Nastaʿlīq calligraphic hand, whic ...
. Both scripts indicate gemination through the uses of diacritics. In Gurmukhi the diacritic is called the which is written ''before'' the geminated consonant and is mandatory. In contrast, the ''
shadda Shaddah ( , , also called by the verbal noun from the same root, tashdid ) is one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, indicating a geminated consonant. It is functionally equivalent to writing a consonant twice in the orthograp ...
'', which is used to represent gemination in the Shahmukhi script, is not necessarily written, retaining the tradition of the original
Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...
and
Persian language Persian ( ), also known by its endonym and exonym, endonym Farsi (, Fārsī ), is a Western Iranian languages, Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian languages, Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian subdivision ...
, where diacritics are usually omitted from writing, except to clear ambiguity, and is written ''above'' the geminated consonant. In the cases of
aspirated consonant In phonetics, aspiration is a strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with t ...
s in the Shahmukhi script, the ''
shadda Shaddah ( , , also called by the verbal noun from the same root, tashdid ) is one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, indicating a geminated consonant. It is functionally equivalent to writing a consonant twice in the orthograp ...
'' remains on the consonant, not on the ''do-cashmī he''. 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:


Russian

In Russian, consonant length (indicated with two letters, as in 'bathtub') may occur in several situations. Minimal pairs (or
chroneme In linguistics, a chroneme is an abstract phonological suprasegmental feature used to signify contrastive differences in the length of speech sounds. Both consonants and vowels can be viewed as displaying this features. The noun ''chroneme'' is ...
s) exist, such as 'to hold' vs 'to support', and their conjugations, or 'length' vs 'long' adj. f. *
Word formation In linguistics, word formation is an ambiguous term that can refer to either: * the processes through which words can change (i.e. morphology), or * the creation of new lexemes in a particular language Morphological A common method of word form ...
or
conjugation Conjugation or conjugate may refer to: Linguistics *Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form *Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language Mathematics *Complex conjugation, the change o ...
: ( 'length') > ( '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. ** ( 'highest').


Spanish

There are phonetic geminate consonants in Caribbean Spanish due to the assimilation of /l/ and /ɾ/ in syllabic coda to the following consonant. Examples of Cuban Spanish:


Luganda

Luganda Ganda or Luganda ( ; ) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 5.56 million Ganda people, Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, includ ...
(a
Bantu language The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, South ...
) is unusual in that gemination can occur word-initially, as well as word-medially. For example, 'cat', 'grandfather' and 'madam' all begin with geminate consonants. There are three consonants that cannot be geminated: , and . Whenever morphological rules would geminate these consonants, and are prefixed with , and changes to . For example: * 'army' (root) > 'an army' (noun) * 'stone' (root) > 'a stone' (noun); is usually spelt * 'nation' (root) > 'a nation' (noun) * 'medicine' (root) > 'medicine' (noun)


Japanese

In Japanese, consonant length is distinctive (as is vowel length). Gemination in the
syllabary In the Linguistics, linguistic study of Written language, written languages, a syllabary is a set of grapheme, written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) mora (linguistics), morae which make up words. A symbol in a syllaba ...
is represented with the sokuon, a small : for
hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", ...
in native words and for
katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...
in foreign words. For example, (, ) means 'came; arrived', while (, ) means 'cut; sliced'. With the influx of ''
gairaigo is Japanese for "loan word", and indicates a transcription into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese (especially Literary Chine ...
'' ('foreign words') into Modern Japanese, voiced consonants have become able to geminate as well: () means '(computer) bug', and () means 'bag'. Distinction between
voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...
gemination and
voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refe ...
gemination is visible in pairs of words such as (, meaning 'kit') and (, meaning 'kid'). In addition, in some variants of colloquial Modern Japanese, gemination may be applied to some adjectives and adverbs (regardless of voicing) in order to add emphasis: (, 'amazing') contrasts with (, '''really'' amazing'); (, , 'with all one's strength') contrasts with (, , really'' with all one's strength').


Turkic languages


Turkish

In Turkish gemination is indicated by two identical letters as in most languages that have phonemic gemination. * "mother" * "freedom" Loanwords originally ending with a phonemic geminated
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
are always written and pronounced without the ending gemination as in Arabic. * (
hajj Hajj (; ; also spelled Hadj, Haj or Haji) is an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest city for Muslims. Hajj is a mandatory religious duty for capable Muslims that must be carried out at least once in their lifetim ...
) (from Arabic pronounced ) * (
Islamic calligraphy Islamic calligraphy is the artistic practice of penmanship and calligraphy, in the languages which use Arabic alphabet or the Arabic script#Additional letters used in other languages, alphabets derived from it. It is a highly stylized and struc ...
) (from Arabic pronounced ) Although gemination is resurrected when the word takes a suffix. * becomes ('to hajj') when it takes the suffix "-a" ('to', indicating destination) * becomes ('of calligraphy') when it takes the suffix "-ın" ('of', expressing possession) Gemination also occurs when a
suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...
starting with a consonant comes after a word that ends with the same consonant. * ('hand') + ("-s", marks
plural In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...
) = ('hands'). (contrasts with , 's/he eliminates') * ('to throw') + ("-ed", marks
past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some hav ...
, first person plural) = ('we threw mth.). (contrasts with , 'waste')


Dravidian languages


Malayalam

In
Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...
, compounding is phonologically conditioned called as
sandhi Sandhi ( ; , ) is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function o ...
and gemination occurs at word boundaries. Gemination sandhi is called ''dvitva sandhi'' or 'doubling sandhi'. Consider following example: * + ( + ) – () Gemination also occurs in a single morpheme like () which has a different meaning from ().


Uralic languages


Sámi languages

Many
Sámi languages The Sámi languages ( ), also rendered in English language, English as Sami and Saami, are a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Indigenous Sámi peoples in Northern Europe (in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and extreme northwest ...
have gemination as a phonetic feature. The Proto-Sami language had as many as four different lengths, although there is only one living language where this is attested: certains dialect of Ume Sámi. Most varieties have merged them to two or three contrastive degrees of length.


Estonian

Estonian has three phonemic lengths; however, the third length is a
suprasegmental In linguistics, prosody () is the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants. Often, prosody specifically refers to such ele ...
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 < * 'of the city' vs. overlong < * < * 'to the city'.


Finnish

Consonant length is phonemic in Finnish, for example ('fireplace', transcribed with the length sign or with a doubled letter ) and ('back'). Consonant gemination occurs with simple consonants ( : ) and between syllables in the pattern (consonant)-vowel-sonorant-stop-stop-vowel () but not generally in codas or with longer syllables. (This occurs in
Sami languages Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise ...
and in the Finnish name , which is of Sami origin.)
Sandhi Sandhi ( ; , ) is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function o ...
often produces geminates. Both consonant and vowel gemination are phonemic, and both occur independently, e.g. , , , (Karelian surname, 'paint', 'model', and 'secular'). In Standard Finnish, consonant gemination of exists only in
interjection An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling, situation or reaction. It is a diverse category, with many different types, such as exclamations ''(ouch!'', ''wow!''), curses (''da ...
s, new loan words and in the playful word ''hihhuli'', with its origins in the 19th century, and derivatives of that word. In many Finnish dialects there are also the following types of special gemination in connection with long vowels: the southwestern special gemination (), with lengthening of stops + shortening of long vowel, of the type < ; the common gemination (), with lengthening of all consonants in short, stressed syllables, of the type > and its extension (which is strongest in the northwestern Savonian dialects); the eastern dialectal special gemination (), which is the same as the common gemination but also applies to unstressed syllables and certain clusters, of the types > and > .


Wagiman

In Wagiman, an indigenous Australian language, consonant length in stops is the primary phonetic feature that differentiates
fortis and lenis In linguistics, ''fortis'' ( ; Latin for 'strong') and ''lenis'' (, ; Latin for 'weak'), sometimes identified with 'tense' and 'lax', are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy, respectively. English has fortis ...
stops. Wagiman does not have phonetic voice. Word-initial and word-final stops never contrast for length.


Writing

In
written language A written language is the representation of a language by means of writing. This involves the use of visual symbols, known as graphemes, to represent linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes, or words. However, written language is ...
, 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 Shaddah ( , , also called by the verbal noun from the same root, tashdid ) is one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, indicating a geminated consonant. It is functionally equivalent to writing a consonant twice in the orthograp ...
in Arabic, the
dagesh The dagesh () is a diacritic that is used in the Hebrew alphabet. It takes the form of a dot placed inside a consonant. A dagesh can either indicate a "hard" plosive version of the consonant (known as , literally 'light dot') or that the conson ...
in Classical Hebrew, or the sokuon in Japanese. In the
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...
, long consonants are normally written using the triangular colon , e.g. ('feathers', 'pens', also a kind of pasta), though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying
phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
forms, or in tone languages to facilitate diacritic marking). * Catalan uses the raised dot (called an
interpunct An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. ( Word-separating spaces did not appe ...
) to distinguish a geminated from a palatal . Thus, ('parallel') and (Standard Catalan: , ). * Estonian uses ''b'', ''d'', ''g'' for short consonants, and ''p'', ''t'', ''k'' and ''pp'', ''tt'', ''kk'' are used for long consonants. * Hungarian digraphs and trigraphs are geminated by doubling the first letter only, thus the geminate form of is (rather than *''szsz''), and that of is . * The only digraph in Ganda, is doubled in the same way: . * In
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
, geminated instances of the sound cluster (represented by the digraph ) are always indicated by writing , except in the words and , where the letter is doubled. The gemination of sounds , and , (spelled , , and , respectively) is not indicated because these consonants are always geminated when occurring between vowels. Also the sounds , (both spelled ) are always geminated when occurring between vowels, yet their gemination is sometimes shown, redundantly, by doubling the as, e.g., in . *In Japanese, non-nasal gemination () is denoted by placing the "small" variant of the syllable ( or ) between two syllables, where the end syllable must begin with a consonant. For nasal gemination, precede the syllable with the letter for mora N ( or ). The script of these symbols must match with the surrounding syllables. * In Swedish and Norwegian, the general rule is that a geminated consonant is written double, unless succeeded by another consonant. Hence ('hall'), but ('Halt!'). In Swedish, this does not apply to morphological changes (so , 'cold' and , 'coldly' or compounds o ('flatbread') The exception are some words ending in ''-m'', thus home' ut ('at home')and stem' but lamb', to distinguish the word from ('lame') with a long /), as well as adjectives in ''-nn'', so , 'thin' but , 'thinly' (while Norwegian has a rule always prohibiting 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)).


Double letters that are not long consonants

Doubled orthographic consonants do not always indicate a long phonetic consonant. * In English, for example, the 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'' (from ''tap'') has a short ''a'' , which is distinct from the diphthongal long ''a'' in ''taping'' (from ''tape''). * In Standard
Modern Greek Modern Greek (, or , ), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the language sometimes referred to ...
, doubled orthographic consonants have no phonetic significance at all. *
Hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...
(the Korean alphabet) and its romanizations also use double consonants, but to indicate
fortis Fortis may refer to: Business * Fortis (Swiss watchmaker), a Swiss watch company * Fortis Films, an American film and television production company founded by actress and producer Sandra Bullock * Fortis Healthcare, a chain of hospitals in ...
articulation, not gemination. * In Klallam, a sequence of two sounds such as in a word like 'sleep' is not pronounced like a geminated stop with a long closure duration – rather the sequence is pronounced as a sequence of two individual sounds such that the first is released before the articulation of the second . * In the Old Icelandic orthography of the
First Grammatical Treatise The First Grammatical Treatise (, roughly: "first language studies writ act") is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the ...
, geminates are indicated by small caps: ⟨ʙ⟩, ⟨ᴅ⟩, ⟨ꜰ⟩, ⟨ɢ⟩, ⟨ᴋ⟩, ⟨ʟ⟩, ⟨ᴍ⟩, ⟨ɴ⟩, ⟨ᴘ⟩, ⟨ʀ⟩, ⟨ꜱ⟩ and ⟨ᴛ⟩, whereas modern renditions of Old Norse designate geminates by two consecutive stops, i.e. ⟨bb⟩, ⟨ff⟩, ⟨gg⟩, ⟨kk⟩ ⟨ll⟩, ⟨mm⟩, ⟨nn⟩ ⟨pp⟩, ⟨rr⟩, ⟨ss⟩ and ⟨tt⟩, respectively. * In Proto-Basque notation, capital letters are employed to denote the fortis–lenis contrast, which manifests as a difference between geminate vs. ⟨L⟩ /lː/ vs. ⟨l⟩ /l/, ⟨N⟩ /nː/ vs. ⟨n⟩ /n/, but capitals might also denote voiceless vs. voiced (⟨T⟩ /t/ vs. ⟨d⟩ /d/, ⟨K⟩ /k/ vs. ⟨g⟩ /g/, no ⟨P⟩ exists in Mitxelena's reconstruction consonant system of Proto-Basque, only ⟨b⟩) or affricate vs. sibilant distinction (⟨TZ⟩ /t̻s̻/ vs. ⟨z⟩ /s̻/, ⟨TS⟩ /t̺s̺/ vs. ⟨s⟩ /s̺/), or trill ⟨R⟩ /r/ vs. tap ⟨r⟩ /ɾ/.


See also

* West Germanic gemination *
Glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...
*
Length (phonetics) In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that have distinctively extended duration compared with other sounds. There are long vowels as well as long consonants (the latter are often called ''geminates''). Many languages do n ...
*
Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...
*
Syllabic consonant A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''awful'', respectively. To represe ...
*
Index of phonetics articles A * Acoustic phonetics * Active articulator * Affricate * Airstream mechanism * Alexander John Ellis * Alexander Melville Bell * Alfred C. Gimson * Allophone * Alveolar approximant () * Alveolar click () * Alveolar consonant * Alveolar ej ...


References

{{Suprasegmentals Consonants Phonetics