In phonetics, gemination or consonant elongation happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Gemination is distinct from stress and may appear independently of it. Gemination literally means "twinning", and is from the same Latin root as "Gemini".
Contents
- Phonetics
- Phonology
- Arabic
- Berber
- Catalan
- Danish
- English
- Estonian
- Finnish
- French
- Ganda
- Greek
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latin and Romance languages
- Malayalam
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Punjabi
- Russian
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Wagiman
- Writing
- Other representations of double letters
- References
Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Arabic, Berber, Maltese, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Classical Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. Most languages (including English) do not have distinctive long consonants. Vowel length is distinctive in more languages than consonant length, although several languages feature both independently (as in Arabic, Japanese, Finnish, and Estonian), or have interdependent vowel and consonant length (as in Norwegian and Swedish).
Phonetics
Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants, and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, delaying release. That is, the "hold" is lengthened. Long consonants are usually around one and a half or two times as long as short consonants, depending on the language.
Phonology
Gemination of consonants as a distinctive feature occurs in some languages, but not in others. It is subject to various phonological constraints depending on the language.
In some languages, e.g., Italian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic and Ganda, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. That is, a short vowel within a stressed syllable almost always precedes a long consonant or a consonant cluster, whereas a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. In Classical Arabic, a long vowel was lengthened even more before permanently geminate consonants; however, this is no longer exhibited in varieties of colloquial Arabic or even Modern Standard Arabic.
In other languages, such as Finnish, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, both are phonemic, such that taka /taka/ "back", takka /takːa/ "fireplace", taakka /taːkːa/ "burden", and so forth are different, unrelated words. Finnish consonant length is also affected by consonant gradation. Another important phenomenon is that sandhi produces long consonants to word boundaries from an archiphonemic glottal stop, for example |otaʔ se| > /otasːe/ "take it!"
Also in Finnish some compound words, where the initial word ends in an e, the initial consonant of the following word is geminated: jätesäkki "trash bag" [jætesːækːi], tervetuloa "welcome" [terʋetːuloa], and in certain cases, a v following a u is geminated by most people: ruuvi "screw" /ruːʋ:i/, vauva "baby" [ʋauʋ:a]. In the Tampere area dialect a word that receives gemination of v after u, a u is often deleted: ruuvi [ruʋ:i], vauva [ʋaʋ:a], and lauantai "Saturday" receives a medial v [lauʋantai] and may go through a further deletion of u: [laʋ:antai].
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, and many of the High Alemannic German dialects (such as Thurgovian). Some African languages, such as Setswana and Ganda, also have initial consonant length—in fact, initial consonant length is very common in Ganda and is used to indicate certain grammatical features. In colloquial Finnish and spoken Italian, long consonants are produced between words by sandhi effects.
Among stops and fricatives, in most languages only voiceless consonants occur geminated.
The reverse of gemination is the process in which a long consonant is reduced to a short one. This is called degemination. This is a pattern observed in Baltic-Finnic consonant gradation, where the strong grade (often, but not necessarily nominative) form of the word is degeminated into a weak grade (often all other cases) form of the word, e.g. taakka > taakan (burden, of the burden).
Arabic
Arabic marks gemination with a diacritic shaped like a rounded w, called the shadda ( ّ ). It is written above the consonant which is to be doubled. It is the most common diacritic (ḥaraka) that is sometimes used in ordinary spelling to avoid ambiguity. For instance, it is sometimes used to distinguish مدرّسة mudarrisa "female teacher" from مدرسة madrasa "school".
Berber
In Berber languages, 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.
In addition to lexical geminates, Berber presents two additional types of geminates: phonologically derived and morphologically derived ones. Phonologically derived geminates can surface either through concatenation (e.g. [fas sin] ‘give him two!’) or through complete assimilation (e.g. /rad = k i-sli/ [rakk isli] ‘he will touch you’). The morphological alternations include imperfective gemination, whereby certain Berber verbs form their imperfective stem by geminating one consonant in their perfective stem (e.g. [ftu] ‘go! PF’, [fttu] ‘go! IMPF’), and quantity alternations between singular and plural forms (e.g. [afus] ‘hand’, [ifassn] ‘hands’).
Catalan
In Catalan, gemination is expressed with consonant repetition. Since repetition of the letter 'l' generates the digraph 'll' (it represents the phoneme /ʎ/), its gemination is represented as two 'l's separated by a centered dot (l·l):
Danish
Danish has a three-way consonant length distinction. For instance:
The word 'bundene' can phonemically be analyzed as /bɔnənə/, with the middle schwa being assimilated to [n].
English
In English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive within root words. For instance, 'baggage' is pronounced /ˈbæɡɪdʒ/, not */bæɡːɪdʒ/. 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:
With affricates, however, this does not occur. For instance:
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:
In some dialects gemination is also found when the suffix -ly follows a root ending in -l or -ll, as in:
In some varieties of Welsh English, the process takes place indiscriminately between vowels, e.g. in money [ˈmɜn.niː] but it also applies with graphemic duplication (thus, orthographically dictated), e.g. butter [ˈbɜt̚.tə]
Estonian
Estonian has three phonemic lengths; however, the third length is a suprasegmental feature, which is as much tonal patterning as a length distinction. It is traceable to allophony caused by now-deleted suffixes, for example half-long linna < *linnan "of the city" vs. overlong linna < *linnahan "to the city".
Finnish
Consonant length is phonemic in Finnish: For example, takka [ˈtakːa] (transcribed with the length sign [ː] or with a doubled sign [ˈtakka]), 'fireplace', but taka [ˈtaka], 'back'. Consonant gemination occurs with simple consonants (hakaa : hakkaa) and between syllables in the pattern (consonant)-vowel-sonorant-stop-stop-vowel (palkka), but not generally in codas or with longer syllables. (This occurs in Sami languages, so there is the name of Sami origin Jouhkki).
Sandhi may also produce geminates. Consonant and vowel gemination are both phonemic and occur independently, e.g. Mali, maali, malli, maallinen (Mali (a Karelian surname), paint, model and secular, respectively).
In Standard Finnish, consonant gemination of [h] exists only in interjections, new loan words and in the playful word "hihhuli", with its origins in the 19th century, and derivatives of that word.
French
In French, consonant length is usually not distinctive, but in certain exceptional cases it can be, such as the pair courons [kuʁɔ̃] vs courrons [kuʁːɔ̃]. Gemination also occurs in case of schwa elision.
Ganda
Ganda is unusual in that gemination can occur word-initially, as well as word-medially. For example, kkapa /kːapa/ 'cat', /ɟːaɟːa/ jjajja 'grandfather' and /ɲːabo/ nnyabo 'madam' all begin with geminate consonants.
There are three consonants that cannot be geminated: /j/, /w/ and /l/. Whenever morphological rules would geminate these consonants, /j/ and /w/ are prefixed with /ɡ/, and /l/ changes to /d/. For example:
Greek
In Ancient Greek, consonant length was distinctive, e.g., μέλω [mélɔː] "I am of interest" vs. μέλλω [mélːɔː] "I am going to". The distinction has been lost in Standard Modern Greek and most varieties, with the exception of Cypriot such as in the pairs πολλοί [polˈli] 'a lot' vs. πολύ [poˈli] 'very'; the same is true for some varieties of the Aegean.
Hindi
See section below for Urdu. Same rules for both languages.
Hungarian
In Hungarian, consonant length is phonemic, e.g. megy [ˈmɛɟ], 'goes' and meggy [ˈmɛɟː], 'sour cherry'.
Italian
In Standard Italian, consonant length is distinctive. For example, bevve, meaning "he/she drank", is /ˈbevːe/, while beve ("he/she drinks/is drinking") is /ˈbeːve/. Tonic syllables are bimoraic and are therefore composed of either a long vowel in an open syllable (as in beve) or a short vowel in a closed syllable (as in bevve).
Double consonants occur not only within words but at word boundaries, where they are pronounced but not necessarily written: chi + sa = chissà ("who knows") /kisˈsa/ and vado a casa ("I am going home") pronounced /ˌvaːdo a ˈkːaːsa/ (the latter example refers to central and southern standard Italian). See syntactic doubling.
Japanese
In Japanese, consonant length is distinctive (as is vowel length). Gemination in the syllabary is represented with the sokuon, a small tsu: っ for hiragana in native words and ッ for katakana in foreign words. For example, 来た (きた, kita) means "came; arrived", while 切った (きった, kitta) means "cut; sliced". バグ (bagu) means "(computer) bug", and バッグ (baggu) means "bag".
Korean
In Korean, geminates arise from assimilation, and they are distinctive.
Latin and Romance languages
In Latin, consonant length was distinctive, as in anus "old woman" vs. annus "year". (Vowel length was also distinctive in Latin, but is not reflected in the orthography.) Gemination inherited from Latin still occurs in Italian. It has been almost completely lost in French and completely in Romanian. In West Iberian languages, former Latin geminate consonants often evolved to new phonemes, including some lexicon with nasal vowels of Portuguese and Old Galician (that are partly of Celtic influence) as well as most Spanish /ɲ/ and /ʎ/, but phonetic length of both consonants and vowels is no longer distinctive.
Malayalam
In Malayalam, compounding is phonologically conditioned so gemination occurs at words' internal boundaries.
Consider following example:
മേശ + പെട്ടി (mēśa + peṭṭi, ) – മേശപ്പെട്ടി (mēśappeṭṭi)
Norwegian
Gemination is indicated in writing by double consonants. Gemination often differentiates between otherwise unrelated words.
Polish
In Polish, consonant length is indicated with two same letters. Examples:
Consonant length is distinctive and sometimes is necessary to distinguish words:
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). Examples:
Punjabi
Punjabi in its official script Gurmukhi uses a diacritic called an áddak ( ੱ ) (ਅੱਧਕ, [ə́dːək]) which is written above the word and indicates that the following consonant is geminate. Gemination is specially characteristic of Punjabi compared to other Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi-Urdu, where instead of the presence of consonant lengthening, the preceding vowel tends to be lengthened. Consonant length is distinctive in Punjabi, for example:
Russian
In Russian, consonant length (indicated with two letters, as in ванна ˈvannə 'bathtub') may occur in several situations.
Minimal pairs (or chronemes) exist, such as подержать [pədʲɪrˈʐatʲ] 'to hold' vs поддержать [pəddʲɪrˈʐatʲ] 'to support', and their conjugations.
Turkish
In Turkish, gemination in word stem is exclusive to loanwords.
Loanwords originally ending with a geminated consonant are always written and spelled without the ending gemination.
Although gemination is resurrected when the word takes a suffix.
Gemination also occurs when a suffix starting with a consonant comes after a word which ends with the same consonant.
Ukrainian
In Ukrainian, geminates are found between vowels: багаття /bɑˈɦɑtʲːɑ/ "bonfire", подружжя /poˈdruʒʲːɑ/ "married couple", обличчя /obˈlɪt͡ʃʲːɑ/ "face". Geminates also occur at the start of a few words: лляний /lʲːɑˈnɪj/ "flaxen", forms of the verb лити "to pour" (ллю /lʲːu/, ллєш /lʲːɛʃ/ etc.), ссати /ˈsːɑtɪ/ "to suck" and derivatives. Gemination is in some cases semantically crucial; for example, різниця rʲizˈnɪt͡sʲɑ means "difference" while різниться rʲizˈnɪt͡sʲːɑ means "differs".
Urdu
Gemination is common in Urdu and means doubling of the consonant sound. Found both in words of Indic-origin and Arabic-origin, but not for Persian-origin. Examples below.
For aspirated consonants (bh, ph, th, dh, kh, and so on), the gemination means twinning of their non-aspirated sound followed by aspirated. Hard to quote a gemination scenario where an aspirated consonant is truly doubled by itself. Examples:
Wagiman
In Wagiman, an indigenous Australian language, consonant length in stops is the primary phonetic feature that differentiates fortis and lenis stops. Wagiman does not have phonetic voice. Word-initial and word-final stops never contrast for length.
Writing
In written language, consonant length is often indicated by writing a consonant twice ("ss", "kk", "pp", and so forth), but can also be indicated with a special symbol, such as the shadda in Arabic, the dagesh in Classical Hebrew, or the sokuon in Japanese. Estonian uses 'b', 'd', 'g' for short consonants, and 'p', 't', 'k' and 'pp', 'tt', 'kk' are used for long consonants.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, long consonants are normally written using the triangular colon ː, e.g., penne [penːe] ('feathers', 'pens', also a kind of pasta), though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying phonemic forms).
Thus, paral·lel ("parallel") and Llull .
Other representations of double letters
Doubled orthographic consonants do not always indicate a long phonetic consonant.