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Re: long consonants

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 9, 2005, 6:28
#1/Max wrote:
> Henrik Theiling wrote: > > To travel > >around the world, > >naming a few not-so-unknown langs: it exists in > >Finnish, Estonian, > >Japanese, Arabic, Greenlandic, Inuktitut, Swiss > >German, and many > >others. (And I'm sure I forgot a few other famous > >ones.) > > > >I'd say it's quite common. > > > > ok thanks for these explainations I now feel more rassured about using > them > in conlangs and feeling them natural > > but still a question: are long consonants... geminated consonants phonemic > in these languages?
They can be considered phonemic, in that they distinguish meaning in minimal pairs: Ital. anno [an:o] 'year' :: ano [ano] 'anus'. But it may depend on how one defines "phonemic" and what theoretical model one uses...And of course they can originate historically in a variety of ways-- assimilation of cons. clusters, for ex. IIRC in Arabic, gemination of C is a feature of some derivational processes.
> > Are geminated consonants opposed to the short ones enough to make that > pronounciating a germinated consonant as short would make the sense > different or would it remains the same?
Yes, definitely. I don't have my lists handy, but there are lots of min.pairs in the South Sulawesi languages-- some I remember, Bugis mita ['mita] 'to see' :: mitta ['mit:a] 'long time'; Makassarese, near-minimal: tallu '3', allo 'sun' :: alu 'pestle', talo 'defeated'
> > And are they really phonemes in the sense it may be used in a root or do > they simply *occur* when you paste a word that ends with the same > consonant > it is pasted to, like it is in the "penknife" example Sanghyeon Seo gave?
That can happen too, but it's purely phonetic; in such cases there's always a morpheme boundary. Again Bugis: aseng 'name' + -ku 'my' > asekku 'my name'; + -mu 'your' asemmu. Similary in Arab. where the -l of the article _al_ assimilates to certain initial consonants-- as/salaam '(the) peace', ar/rahman 'the omnipotent'. Geminates are fascinating!!