Geminated consonant

In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant 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, others describe two distinct phenomena.

Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Arabic, Berber, Danish, Estonian, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Punjabi, Polish and Turkish. Other languages, such as English, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates.

Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Finnish and Estonian; 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. A clear example are the Norwegian words ('ceiling or roof' of a building), and ('thanks').

Phonetics

Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, which delays release, and the "hold" is lengthened.

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, 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, a long vowel was lengthened even more before permanently-geminate consonants.

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. Another important phenomenon is sandhi, which produces long consonants at word boundaries when there is an archiphonemic glottal stop > 'take it!'

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 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. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among them are Pattani Malay, Chuukese, Moroccan Arabic, a few Romance languages such as Sicilian and Neapolitan as well as many High Alemannic German dialects, such as that of Thurgovia. Some African languages, such as Setswana and Luganda, also have initial consonant length: it is very common in Luganda and indicates certain grammatical features. In colloquial Finnish and in Italian, long consonants occur in specific instances as sandhi phenomena.

The difference between singleton and geminate consonants varies within and across languages. Sonorants show more distinct geminate-to-singleton ratios while sibilants 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 that the strong grade (often the nominative) 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 indicates gemination with a diacritic ( ) shaped like a lowercase Greek omega 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, 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 . Phonologically-derived geminates can surface by concatenation (e.g. 'give him two!') or by complete assimilation (e.g. 'he will touch you'). The 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 in the Philippines, Micronesia, and Sulawesi 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 such as Kelantan-Pattani Malay and Terengganu Malay. 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 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 Tuvaluan allows for word-initial geminates, such as 'overcooked'.

Indo-European languages

English

In English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive within root words. 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, nasal, or stop.

For instance:
* b: ''subbasement''
* d: ''midday''
* f: ''life force''
* g: ''egg girl''
* k: ''bookkeeper''
* l: ''guileless''
* m: ''calm man'' or ''roommate'' (in some dialects) or ''prime minister''
* n: ''evenness''
* p: ''lamppost'' (cf. lamb post, compost)
* r: ''fire road''
* s: ''misspell'' or ''this saddle''
* sh: ''fish shop''
* t: ''cattail''
* th: ''both thighs''
* v: ''live voter''
* z: ''pays zero''

With affricates, 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 pairs 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'' (only in some varieties of General American)

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, 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 ("c'est terrifiant" realised �tɛʁ.ʁi.fjɑ̃, 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 l.lyˈzjɔ̃by influence of the spelling.

However, gemination is distinctive in a few cases. Statements such as She said ~ She said it /ɛl a di/ ~ /ɛl l‿a di/ can commonly be distinguished by gemination. In a more sustained pronunciation, gemination distinguishes the conditional (and possibly the future tense) from the imperfect: ''courrai'' (will run) /kuʁ.ʁɛ/ vs. ''courais'' (ran) /ku.ʁɛ/, or the indicative from the subjunctive, as in ''croyons'' (we believe) /kʁwa.jɔ̃ / vs. ''croyions'' (we believed) /kʁwaj.jɔ̃ /.

Greek

In Ancient 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.

Hindustani

Gemination is common in both Hindi and Urdu

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