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Japanese Long Consonants

From:Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Date:Thursday, October 28, 2004, 15:38
I've read that Japanese Long consonants are actually a glottal stop and
another consonant together, which I guess is why I find it easier to
hear the difference in Japanese than in a language like Hungarian (where
the long consonants aren't formed by adding glottal stops). I was
thinking of introducing into a language a system of three accents:

unaccented eg i       short
acute accent eg í      long
grave accent eg ì     short, terminated by glottal stop.

So for instance I guess nippon written using this system would be nìpon.
But I'm not sure about this... I'm not sure if I should have long vowels
that can terminate with a glottal stop as well. I was thinking that this
system could let me do some interesting sound changes... like for
instance, d   ->   D   inside words, like in spanish, but the change is
blocked by a glottal stop (which later gets dropped), so I could have:

d after any vowel without a grave accent:                  D
d word initially or after a vowel with a grave accent:   d

Since these might be contrasted in some pairs, it wouldn't just be a
phonetic rule. I was thinking of a whole raft of similar changes I could
do that the glottal stops would influence, so the accents would alter
the pronounciation of the following consonant as well as the length of
the vowel. Although... Japanese doesn't allow "long" voiced stops I
don't think, although if I'm doing them right I don't have any problem
pronouncing them.

Reply

Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>