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Re: What is gemination? What are geminates?

From:Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
Date:Monday, November 6, 2000, 22:05
Roger Mills wrote:

>Kristian Jensen wrote: >>The only one I know is Pattani Malay spoken in southern Thailand with long >>consonants occuring in syllable-initial position; [bulE] "moon" vs [b:ulE] >>"months". But I'm sure there are more out there, also with a hypothetical >>contrast like /eb/ vs /ebb/. > >Interesting ex. Any idea how [b:ulE] is pronounced? Not easy to produce a >voiced gem. stop without some kind of voiced onset, [@...] or maybe [m...]; >or possibly preglottalization? I'd be willing to bet this plural form >originated as a reduplicated form.... bVbulE. (First thought was, this is >*bulan with an odd, but not impossible, sound change; is [-an] > E seen >elsewhere? There's also *bulaj (= US usage *bulay) 'white, pale', much >easier phonologically.
Here is what Ladefoged writes in "The Sounds of the World's Languages": "Word-initial long stops are rare, but they exist, for example, in Pattani Malay, which has a length distinction for initial consonants. Illustrative examples are given... SHORT LONG [bulE] "moon" [b:ulE] "many months" [kato?] "to strike" [k:ato?] "frog" [labO] "to make a profit" [l:abO] "spider" [makE] "to eat" [m:akE] "to be eaten" [siku] "elbow" [s:iku] "hand tool" Abramson reports that the mean duration of the closures for the long stops in word-initial position measured in a carrier phrase is three times longer than that for the short consonants. Of course, the onset of closure of an _utterance_-initial voiceless stop has no acoustic signature, and hence the duration difference cannot be readily percieved in this position. Nonetheless, Pattani Malay speakers can reliably recognize words contrasting in initial consonant length in isolation. Abramson suggested that the perceptual cues that compensate for the lack of information about closure duration in initial voiceless unaspirated stops might include intensity of the stop burst, rate of formant transitions, fundamental frequency perturbations, and relative amplitude of the following vowel. In a more recent report, he has shown that Pattani Malay listeners are indeed sensitive to amplitude differences in the initial syllable in forming their judgements about the category of utterance-initial stops." -kristian- 8)