Re: Phonemic vowel and consonant length.

At 10:25 PM -0800 2/1/03, Josh Brandt-Young wrote:
>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.
In an important paper from 1980, Alan Prince showed that Estonian Q3 is a
prosodic feature of stems and not a length feature of individual consonants or
vowels. As you mention, overlength only shows up for certain inflectional
categories. I posted on Estonian prosody a while ago on this list; check the
archives.

In fact, a feature of Miapimoquitch prosody was inspired by the Estonian
alternation. Predicates which are unbound in phase (roughly a conflation of
imperfective aspect and indefinite reference) must begin with a heavy syllable;
predicates which are bound in phase have no such requirement.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson