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Gemination

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In phonetics, '''gemination''' is when a spoken consonant is "doubled", so that it is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a "single" consonant. The term comes from the word ''geminus'', Latin for "twin". Gemination is distinctive in certain languages, for instance Italian language Italian, Japanese language Japanese, Arabic language Arabic, Finnish language Finnish. Most languages (including English language English) do not have distinctive geminates. Estonian language Estonian has three phonemic lengths; however, the third length is a suprasegmental feature, which is as much tonal patterning as a length distinction. It is traceable to allophony caused by now-deleted suffixes, for example half-long ''linna'' < *''linnan'' "of the city" vs. overlong ''linna'' < *''linnahan'' "to the city".

Gemination in phonetics
Geminated fricative consonant fricatives, nasal consonant nasals, approximant consonant approximants, and trill consonant trills are simply prolonged. In geminated stop consonant stops, the "hold" is prolonged. Geminates are usually around one and a half or two times as long as short consonants, depending on the language.

History of the term
Originally, gemination meant something different than mere consonant length. At the end of the 19th century, German phoneticians thought that a long consonant that follows a checked vowel would have two peaks of sound intensity intensity, whereas other long consonants would have only one. Therefore, these double-peaked long consonants were called ''geminates''. The hypothesis of the two peaks of intensity was abandoned because it could not be confirmed by measurements. Nowadays, the term geminate is a synonym for 'long consonant'. The term is occasionally applied to vowels.

Writing
In writing written language, gemination is often indicated by writing a consonant twice ("ss", "kk", "pp", and so forth), but can also be indicated with a special symbol, such as the Arabic alphabet#Shadda shadda in Arabic, or Sokuon small tsu in Japanese language Japanese. Estonian uses 'b', 'd', 'g' for short consonants, and 'p', 't', 'k' and 'pp', 'tt', 'kk' are used for geminates. Gemination can also be a spelling phenomenon, as in English words like "running" where there is no lengthening of the consonant in actual speech. However, consonants in English are often doubled in writing to indicate that the preceding vowel is 'short', as in "tapping" (from "tap"), which is distinct from "taping" (from "tape").

In English
In the English phonology, gemination is not distinctive. Phonetic gemination occurs marginally. It is often found where a root-word is preceded by another root or a prefix ending with the same letter or sound that the second root begins with. Examples: "homemade", "screenname", "flat-top", "misspell", "unknown", "innumerable". In some dialects it is also found when the suffix -ly follows a root ending in -l or -ll, for example: "fully", "evilly", "dully", "foully". In all dialects it also occurs over word boundaries: "I'll learn", "some money", "with them". In most instances, the absence of this doubling does not affect the meaning, though it may confuse the listener momentarily. Notable examples where the doubling does affect the meaning are the pairs "unaimed" versus "unnamed", and "holy" versus "wholly" (the latter two sounding identical in many areas however).

In other languages
In languages such as Swedish language Swedish or Italian language Italian, consonant gemination and vowel length depend on each other. That is, a short vowel must be followed by a long consonant (geminate), whereas a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. In other languages, such as Finnish language Finnish or Japanese language Japanese, consonant gemination and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, gemination is phonemic, such that ''taka'' "back", ''takka'' "fireplace", ''taakka'' "burden", and so forth are different, unrelated words; this distinctinction is traceable all the way back to Proto-Finno-Ugric. Finnish gemination is also affected by consonant gradation. Another important phenomenon is that sandhi produces geminates to word boundaries from an archiphonemic glottal stop, for example ''ota' se'' → ''otas_se'' "take it!" Distinctive gemination is usually restricted to certain consonants. There are very few languages that have initial gemination, for example Pattani Malay language Pattani Malay, Chuukese language Chuukese or many of the High Alemannic German dialects, for example Thurgovian. Some African languages, such as Setswana also have initial gemination. In spoken Finnish, geminates are produced between words by sandhi effects.

See also
*West Germanic Gemination *Glottal stop *Length (phonetics) *List of phonetic topics

External links
{{Spoken |Gemination.ogg|2005-07-20}} Category:Consonants Category:Phonetics de:Gemination (Sprache) fr:Gémination he:דגש חזק

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