Re: /p/ versus devoiced b?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]On
> Behalf Of Yoon Ha Lee
> Sent: Wednesday, 31 January, 2001 11:49 AM
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: /p/ versus devoiced b?
> 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.
It was asked a few weeks ago, maybe months. I was confused as to what it
was, but I remember it was defined as a "long" consonant sound, as opposed
to a non-geminate "short" consonant. You have that in Japanese with Nippon,
Hokkaido, etc. Generally you have that with doubled consonants in many
languages (but not English, we just have "short" and "long" vowels that
differ mostly in quality).

The difference between "geminate" and "doubled" was described thus:
geminates are "long" or "tense" consoants which may occur word-initally or
word-finally (Korean of course calls the letter for /s'/ _ssangsios_ which
begins with a "doubled s"), while doubled consonants are usually split
between two consonants: English "at-tend", "pos-sible", "ar-range", "add"
and "truck" (a final double "c").

Now in Spanish you can have words beginning in "ll", which originally was a
true geminate "l" (which came from assimiated "pl" and "fl") but that
resulted in palatization. Same thing happened with double "nn" > "ñ"
(n-tilde) but that almost never occurs word-initially except in onomatopoeia
and words from Amerindian languages and such.

http://www.geocities.com/dawier


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