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