Re: consonant length

At 5:59 pm -0700 13/5/99, Danny Wier wrote:
>Quoth Patrick W. Dunn:
>
>>Is there any natlanguage that differentiates between consonants of
>>different length, for instance, s and ss or m and mm?  I've been thinking
>>of tackling an isolating language again (those are harder than you think!)
>>and thought that'd be a nice way to increase my phonemic inventory.
>
>These are the ones I know for sure (or at least think I know):
>
>Latin, Italian, Sanskrit, Hindi-Urdu, a little in Cl. Greek
Why 'little' in Cl. Greek?  I've not noticed any significant difference
between the incidence of long (or geminate) consonants in C. Greek or
Latin.

It's true that ancient Greek did not have geminate voiced plosives except,
probably, [dd] in some early dialects where other dialects had [zz] or [zd]
for the consonant written with zeta; and the geminate voiceless aspirates
of course are represented in spelling by the unaspiated followed by the
aspirated consonant, hence, e.g. our spelling of 'Matthew' where Greek has
tau-theta where we write -tth-.   But all the other consonants are found
geminated often enough.  The Romans, I grant, were happy, as are their
Italian descendants, to lengthen any consonant.

BTW although in standard modern Greek the long consonants have disappeared
from the spoken language, they are still preserved in some of the dialects.

>Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian
Yes, indeed, and when one recalls that the main influences on Tolkien's
Quenya were Latin, Cl. Greek and the FennoUgric langs, it is little wonder
we find long consonants in Quenya.

>Mongolian (?)
>Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ge'ez and daughter languages
>Tamil and other Dravidian languages
>Chechen (?)
>Inuktitut (?)
Certainly the Semitic & Dravidian langs - don't know enough anout the
others, I'm afraid.  They also occur in Korean and, if I've been informed
correctly, in Japanese.

Ray.