Re: Phonemic vowel and consonant length.

Steven Williams wrote:
> 2. I heard tell that Old Japanese lacked a phonemic vowel length
> distinction, but modern Japanese does--I may be wrong, but I'm sure
> there's a language somewhere that's gained the contrast somehow, where
> there was none before. How would this come about?]
Correct.  In fact, Old Japanese was almost entirely CV, except that
V-initial words were possible.  Vowel length originated from several
causes.  One was loss of certain consonants, for example, the adjective
suffix -i was originally -ki, thus, words that now end in -ii were
originally -iki.  /p/ between vowels often became /w/ (thru the
intermediary of /P/), and subsequently was lost except before /a/,
creating new vowel clusters, some of which became long vowels.

IIRC, the Latin accusative plural suffixes -o:s and -a:s were derived
from -ons and -ans.  When the /n/'s were lost, there was compensatory
lengthening of hte previous vowel.  Uatakassi derived its long vowels
from four sources: 1) early Uatakassi /x/ (itself derived from SF /k/ <
/k@/)), 2) early /G/ (< SF /g/ < /g@/), 3) early /X/ (< SF /q/ < /q@/),
4) loss of /h/ which, when between identical vowels, created long
vowels.

> 3. Quite a few languages hold phonemic consonant length
> contrasts--Italian, Japanese, Finnish and so on. Is it at all common,
> or even possible, to have a three-level distinction? In stops?
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a language that did that, but I
don't know of any.

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