Re: long consonants

# 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> writes:
>...
> 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?
Sure.  An impressive example from Finnish:

   http://tinyurl.com/3poxn

It has minimal pairs:

   tulen       tullen
   tuleen      tulleen
   tuulen      tuullen
   tuuleen     tuulleen

> 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?
In many langs, they may be part of the root itself, yes.  On others,
they mainly/only occur when words are composed and morphemes fuse.
There are no global constraints, I think. :-)

**Henrik