Re: Japanese Long Consonants

Chris Bates wrote:

> 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).
In the languages of South Sulawesi (Indonesia) that I worked with, the
geminate stops could be realized as either [?C] or [C:]; for voiceless stops
it was hard to hear much difference; for the voiced ones, a quite noticeable
difference, and the [C:] version was considered "more elegant".

 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.
In the SSul languages, there was correlation between long vowel + 1
consonant, vs. short vowel + geminate, so: /sapa/ ['sa:pa] vs. /sappa/
['sa?pa ~ 'sap:a]. But syllable weight/mora distinctions were not
significant there, as they may be in Japanese.

Some other language might very well have the long C conditioned by the short
vowel, however.


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
Something similar occurs in various Indonesian languages, usually after the
schwa vowel (or its reflex), so it's possible to have e.g. /sara/ < *sada
vs. /sada/ < *s@da.  It suggests that there was something phonologically
"odd" about the historic *@ (which is indeed the cause of most of the
gemination in the SSul languages)

Of course a phonemic [?C ~C:] can arise from old consonant clusters too, if
your lang. is going to permit them. Example: Bugis sad:a ~sa?da 'voice' <
**sabda (Saskrit); Makassarese je?ne 'water' probably cognate with Ml.
j@rnih 'clear'; it also seems to account for some irregularities in Tagalog:
araw 'sun, day' (it "ought" to be *alaw) vs. related langs. aldaw, adlaw,
presumably < PPh. **aldaw (AN *al@jaw, where the *al- _may_ be a prefix)

> 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.
Yes indeed; geminate/long consonants are fun.

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.
>
Is that true, O Japanophones? If so, I wonder why.