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Re: /p/ versus devoiced b?

From:dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 31, 2001, 19:23
On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Danny Wier wrote: > > > Since they're transliterated very often as double consonants, maybe the best > > bet is to pronounce them as geminates. (I forgot, I do have a conlang -- Q > > (also known as Quaelits) -- with "tense" consonants, ejectives and "tense" > > ejectives! I cheat and make the tense consonants pharyngealized.) > > Truly dumb question, what's a geminate? They were discussed at some > point on this list (since I joined) and, as usual, I missed the definition.
Hoo boy. They were discussed, yes, but there are at least two definitions floating around out there. The first (and apparently most common) is that a geminate is a "long" consonant. An example: the /n/ in 'penny' is short, while the /n/ in 'pen knife' is long. The long /n/ of 'pen knife' is a geminate. The definition which I use in my work overlaps considerably with this one for all practical purposes, but it isn't the same. For a consonant to be geminate has to do with a property of its phonological representation irrespective of how it's pronounced. So you could possibly have a geminate consonant that isn't long, or a long consonant that isn't a geminate; though neither of these seem to happen very often. But I seem to be in the minority on this one, so I will concede to the popular usage of geminate = long on this list. However, what Danny is referring to is a particular romanization scheme for Korean in which tense consonants are written as doubled consonants. I don't know if they are really longer in their articulation than the plain or aspirated series, though, so I can't comment on the suitability of substituting a long pronunciation for the tense consonants. Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu "The strong craving for a simple formula has been the undoing of linguists." - Edward Sapir