Re: Phonemic vowel and consonant length.
| From: | Josh Brandt-Young <vionau@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, February 2, 2003, 6:28 |
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Quoth Steven Williams:
> 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?
In fact, Estonian, which you mentioned earlier in the context of a triple
vowel-length distinction, also has three stop lengths:
[lina] "linen"
[lin:a] "town" (genitive)
[lin::a] "town" (short illative)
However, the distinction between long and overlong (as they call it) isn't
used to distinguish different *words* AFAIK, but only in the declension of
the noun. Still, that's some pretty weird stuff.
Cheers,
Josh
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Josh Brandt-Young <vionau@...>
This message written in incredibly misspelled Swahili.
Humor not necessarily funny.
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