Re: Japanese Long Consonants

From my somewhat more recent knowledge of Japanese:

Japanese has long vowels, and psuedo-long consonants.

Long vowels are actually fairly common, and there are many minimal pairs.
They're written as /cv/+/v/, with the second V being changed to /u/ if the
first one is /o/ or /u/. They are two "beats" long, and depending on the
accent there may or may not be an audible beat inbetween the two.

There are "long" consonants; these are written as /small-tsu/+/cv/. They
work moreorless like the shadda in Arabic; the initial part of the consonant
is pronounced, held, and finished. E.g., Kappa = ka-smalltsu-pa = ka, hold
lip-press of p, release. ("Smalltsu" is just the letter 'tsu', written small
and next to the preceeding letter. It's not pronounced 'tsu' at all in this
form.)

That's also more rarely used as a glottal stop at the end of an explanation,
e.g., 'a-smalltsu!'

Dunno if any of that matters to your implementation or not, but there ya go.

 - Sai