In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from gemini 'twins'[1]), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant.[2] It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant.[3] Some phonological theories use 'doubling' as a synonym for gemination, while others describe two distinct phenomena.[3]
Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Japanese. Other languages, such as Greek, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates.
Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Finnish and Estonian; however, in languages like Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish, vowel length and consonant length are interdependent. For example, in Norwegian and Swedish, a geminated consonant is always preceded by a short vowel, while an ungeminated consonant is preceded by a long vowel.
Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, which delays release, and the "hold" is lengthened.
In terms of consonant duration, Berber and Finnish are reported to have a 3-to-1 ratio, compared with around 2-to-1 (or lower) in Japanese,[4] Italian, and Turkish.[5]
Gemination of consonants is distinctive in some languages and then is subject to various phonological constraints that depend on the language.
In some languages, like Italian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Luganda, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. A short vowel within a stressed syllable almost always precedes a long consonant or a consonant cluster, and a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. In Classical Arabic, a long vowel was lengthened even more before permanently-geminate consonants.
In other languages, such as Finnish, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, both are phonemic; Finnish: taka pronounced as //taka// 'back', Finnish: takka pronounced as //takːa// 'fireplace' and Finnish: taakka pronounced as //taːkːa// 'burden' are different, unrelated words. Finnish consonant length is also affected by consonant gradation. Another important phenomenon is sandhi, which produces long consonants at word boundaries when there is an archiphonemic glottal stop pronounced as /otaʔ se/ > Finnish: otas se 'take it (imperative)!'.
In addition, in some Finnish compound words, if the initial word ends in an Finnish: e, the initial consonant of the following word is geminated: Finnish: jätesäkki 'trash bag' pronounced as /[jætesːækːi]/, Finnish: tervetuloa 'welcome' pronounced as /[terʋetːuloa]/. In certain cases, a Finnish: v after a Finnish: u is geminated by most people: Finnish: ruuvi 'screw' pronounced as //ruːʋːi//, Finnish: vauva 'baby' pronounced as /[ʋauʋːa]/. In the Tampere dialect, if a word receives gemination of Finnish: v after Finnish: u, the Finnish: u is often deleted (Finnish: ruuvi pronounced as /[ruʋːi]/, Finnish: vauva pronounced as /[ʋaʋːa]/), and Finnish: lauantai 'Saturday', for example, receives a medial Finnish: v pronounced as /[lauʋantai]/, which can in turn lead to deletion of Finnish: u (pronounced as /[laʋːantai]/).
Distinctive consonant length is usually restricted to certain consonants and environments. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among those that do are Pattani Malay, Chuukese, Moroccan Arabic, a few Romance languages such as Sicilian and Neapolitan, as well as many High Alemannic German dialects, such as that of Thurgovia. Some African languages, such as Setswana and Luganda, also have initial consonant length: it is very common in Luganda and indicates certain grammatical features. In colloquial Finnish and Italian, long consonants occur in specific instances as sandhi phenomena.
The difference between singleton and geminate consonants varies within and across languages. Sonorants show more distinct geminate-to-singleton ratios while sibilants have less distinct ratios. The bilabial and alveolar geminates are generally longer than velar ones.
The reverse of gemination reduces a long consonant to a short one, which is called degemination. It is a pattern in Baltic-Finnic consonant gradation that the strong grade (often the nominative) form of the word is degeminated into a weak grade (often all the other cases) form of the word: Finnish: taakka > Finnish: taakan (burden, of the burden). As a historical restructuring at the phonemic level, word-internal long consonants degeminated in Western Romance languages: e.g. Spanish /ˈboka/ 'mouth' vs. Italian /ˈbokka/, both of which evolved from Latin /ˈbukka/.[6]
Written Arabic indicates gemination with a diacritic () shaped like a lowercase Greek omega or a rounded Latin w, called the Arabic: شَدَّة : Arabic: ّ . Written above the consonant that is to be doubled, the is often used to disambiguate words that differ only in the doubling of a consonant where the word intended is not clear from the context. For example, in Arabic, Form I verbs and Form II verbs differ only in the doubling of the middle consonant of the triliteral root in the latter form, e. g., Arabic: درس (with full diacritics: Arabic: دَرَسَ) is a Form I verb meaning to study, whereas Arabic: درّس (with full diacritics: Arabic: دَرَّسَ) is the corresponding Form II verb, with the middle consonant doubled, meaning to teach.
In Berber, each consonant has a geminate counterpart, and gemination is lexically contrastive. The distinction between single and geminate consonants is attested in medial position as well as in absolute initial and final positions.
In addition to lexical geminates, Berber also has phonologically-derived and morphologically-derived geminates. Phonological alternations can surface by concatenation (e.g., pronounced as /[fas sin]/ 'give him two!') or by complete assimilation (e.g. pronounced as /1=/rad = k i-sli// pronounced as /[rakk isli]/ 'he will touch you'). Morphological alternations include imperfective gemination, with some Berber verbs forming theirimperfective stem by geminating one consonant in their perfective stem (e.g., pronounced as /[ftu]/ 'go! PF', pronounced as /[fttu]/ 'go! IMPF'), as well as quantity alternations between singular and plural forms (e.g., pronounced as /[afus]/ 'hand', pronounced as /[ifassn]/ 'hands').
Austronesian languages in the Philippines, Micronesia, and Sulawesi are known to have geminate consonants.[7]
The Formosan language Kavalan makes use of gemination to mark intensity, as in 'bad' vs. 'very bad'.
Word-initial gemination occurs in various Malay dialects, particularly those found on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula such as Kelantan-Pattani Malay and Terengganu Malay.[8] [9] Gemination in these dialects of Malay occurs for various purposes such as:
The Polynesian language Tuvaluan allows for word-initial geminates, such as 'overcooked'.[10]
In English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive within root words. For instance, baggage is pronounced, not pronounced as /
Gemination is found across words and across morphemes when the last consonant in a given word and the first consonant in the following word are the same fricative, nasal, or stop.[11]
For instance:
With affricates, however, this does not occur. For instance:
In most instances, the absence of this doubling does not affect the meaning, though it may confuse the listener momentarily. The following minimal pairs represent examples where the doubling does affect the meaning in most accents:
Note that whenever pronounced as /[(ɹ)]/ appears (in brackets), non-rhotic dialects of English don't have the gemination, but rather lengthen the preceding vowel.
In some dialects gemination is also found for some words when the suffix -ly follows a root ending in -l or -ll, as in:
but not
In some varieties of Welsh English, the process takes place indiscriminately between vowels, e.g. in money pronounced as /[ˈmɜn.niː]/ but it also applies with graphemic duplication (thus, orthographically dictated), e.g. butter pronounced as /[ˈbɜt̚.tə]/[12]
In French, gemination is usually not phonologically relevant and therefore does not allow words to be distinguished: it mostly corresponds to an accent of insistence (realised pronounced as /[ˈtɛʁ.ʁi.fjɑ̃]/), or meets hyper-correction criteria: one "corrects" one's pronunciation, despite the usual phonology, to be closer to a realization that one imagines to be more correct: thus, the word illusion is sometimes pronounced pronounced as /[il.lyˈzjɔ̃]/ by influence of the spelling.
However, gemination is distinctive in a few cases. Statements such as ('she said') ~ ('she said it') pronounced as //ɛl a di// ~ pronounced as //ɛl l‿a di// can commonly be distinguished by gemination. In a more sustained pronunciation, gemination distinguishes the conditional (and possibly the future tense) from the imperfect: 'will run' pronounced as //kuʁ.ʁɛ// vs. 'ran' pronounced as //ku.ʁɛ//, or the indicative from the subjunctive, as in 'we believe' pronounced as //kʁwa.jɔ̃// vs. 'we believed' pronounced as //kʁwaj.jɔ̃//.
In Ancient Greek, consonant length was distinctive, e.g., Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: μέ'''λ'''ω pronounced as /[mélɔː]/ 'I am of interest' vs. Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: μέ'''λλ'''ω pronounced as /[mélːɔː]/ 'I am going to'. The distinction has been lost in the standard and most other varieties, with the exception of Cypriot (where it might carry over from Ancient Greek or arise from a number of synchronic and diachronic assimilatory processes, or even spontaneously), some varieties of the southeastern Aegean, and Italy.
Gemination is common in both Hindi and Urdu. It does not occur after long vowels and is found in words of both Indic and Arabic origin, but not in those of Persian origin. In Urdu, gemination is represented by the Shadda diacritic, which is usually omitted from writings, and mainly written to clear ambiguity. In Hindi, gemination is represented by doubling the geminated consonant, enjoined with the Virama diacritic.
| Transliteration | Hindi | Urdu | Meaning | Etymology | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urdu: پَتَّہ | 'leaf' | Sanskrit | |||
| Urdu: اَبّا | 'father' | Arabic | |||
| Urdu: دَجّال | 'anti-christ' | ||||
| Urdu: ڈَبَّہ | 'box' | Sanskrit | |||
| 'heaven' | Arabic | ||||
| 'mattress' | Sanskrit |
Gemination of aspirated consonants in Hindi are formed by combining the corresponding non-aspirated consonant followed by its aspirated counterpart. In vocalised Urdu, the shadda is placed on the unaspirated consonant followed by the short vowel diacritic, followed by the do-cashmī hē, which aspirates the preceding consonant. There are few examples where an aspirated consonant is truly doubled.
| 'stone' | ||||
| brown spread on | ||||
| Hindi slang/short for 'half' – | ||||
| 'fly' |
See also: syntactic doubling. Italian is notable among the Romance languages for its extensive geminated consonants. In Standard Italian, word-internal geminates are usually written with two consonants, and geminates are distinctive.[13] For example, Italian: bevve, meaning 'he/she drank', is phonemically pronounced as //ˈbevve// and pronounced pronounced as /it/, while Italian: beve ('he/she drinks/is drinking') is pronounced as //ˈbeve//, pronounced pronounced as /it/. Tonic syllables are bimoraic and are therefore composed of either a long vowel in an open syllable (as in Italian: beve) or a short vowel in a closed syllable (as in Italian: bevve). In varieties with post-vocalic weakening of some consonants (e.g. pronounced as //raˈdʒone// → pronounced as /it/ 'reason'), geminates are not affected (pronounced as //ˈmaddʒo// → pronounced as /it/ 'May').
Double or long consonants occur not only within words but also at word boundaries, and they are then pronounced but not necessarily written: Italian: chi + Italian: sa = Italian: chissà ('who knows') pronounced as /it/ and Italian: vado a casa ('I am going home') pronounced as /it/. All consonants except pronounced as /link/ can be geminated. This word-initial gemination is triggered either lexically by the item preceding the lengthening consonant (e.g. by preposition 'to, at' in pronounced as /[a kˈkaːsa]/ 'homeward' but not by definite article in pronounced as /[la ˈkaːsa]/ 'the house'), or by any word-final stressed vowel ([{{IPA|parˈlɔ ffranˈtʃeːze}}] 's/he spoke French' but [{{IPA|ˈparlo franˈtʃeːze}}] 'I speak French').
In Latin, consonant length was distinctive, as in Latin: a'''n'''us 'old woman' vs. Latin: a'''nn'''us 'year'. Vowel length was also distinctive in Latin until about the fourth century, and was reflected in the orthography with an apex. Geminates inherited from Latin still exist in Italian, in which pronounced as /[ˈanno]/ Italian: anno and pronounced as /[ˈaːno]/ Italian: ano contrast with regard to pronounced as //nn// and pronounced as //n// as in Latin. It has been almost completely lost in French and completely in Romanian. In West Iberian languages, former Latin geminate consonants often evolved to new phonemes, including some instances of nasal vowels in Portuguese and Old Galician as well as most cases of pronounced as //ɲ// and pronounced as //ʎ// in Spanish, but phonetic length of both consonants and vowels is no longer distinctive.
In Nepali, all consonants have geminate counterparts except for pronounced as //w, j, ɦ//. Geminates occur only medially.[14] Examples:
In Norwegian, gemination is indicated in writing by double consonants. Gemination often differentiates between unrelated words. As in Italian, Norwegian uses short vowels before doubled consonants and long vowels before single consonants. There are qualitative differences between short and long vowels:
In Polish, consonant length is indicated with two identical letters. Examples:
Consonant length is distinctive and sometimes is necessary to distinguish words:
Double consonants are common on morpheme borders where the initial or final sound of the suffix is the same as the final or initial sound of the stem (depending on the position of the suffix), after devoicing. Examples:
Punjabi is written in two scripts, namely, Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi. Both scripts indicate gemination through the uses of diacritics. In Gurmukhi the diacritic is called the which is written before the geminated consonant and is mandatory. In contrast, the shadda, which is used to represent gemination in the Shahmukhi script, is not necessarily written, retaining the tradition of the original Arabic script and Persian language, where diacritics are usually omitted from writing, except to clear ambiguity, and is written above the geminated consonant. In the cases of aspirated consonants in the Shahmukhi script, the shadda remains on the consonant, not on the do-cashmī he.
Gemination is specially characteristic of Punjabi compared to other Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi-Urdu, where instead of the presence of consonant lengthening, the preceding vowel tends to be lengthened. Consonant length is distinctive in Punjabi, for example:
| Geminated | ||||||||||
| IPA | Gurmukhi | Shahmukhi | Transliteration | Meaning | IPA | Gurmukhi | Shahmukhi | Transliteration | Meaning | |
| pronounced as //d̪əsᵊ// | 'ten' | pronounced as //d̪əsːə// | 'tell' (imperative) | |||||||
| pronounced as //pət̪a// | [15] | 'aware of something' | pronounced as //pət̪ːa// | 'leaf' | ||||||
| pronounced as //sət̪ᵊ// | 'truth' (liturgical) | pronounced as //sət̪ːə// | 'seven' | |||||||
| pronounced as //kəlɑː// | 'art' | pronounced as //kəlːa// | 'alone' |
In Russian, consonant length (indicated with two letters, as in Russian: ва'''нн'''а pronounced as /[ˈva'''nn'''ə]/ 'bathtub') may occur in several situations.
Minimal pairs (or chronemes) exist, such as pronounced as /[pə'''d'''ʲɪrˈʐatʲ]/ 'to hold' vs pronounced as /[pə'''dʲː'''ɪrˈʐatʲ]/ 'to support', and their conjugations, or pronounced as /[dlʲɪˈ'''n'''a]/ 'length' vs pronounced as /[dlʲɪˈ'''nː'''a]/ 'long' adj. f.
There are phonetic geminate consonants in Caribbean Spanish due to the assimilation of /l/ and /ɾ/ in syllabic coda to the following consonant.[17] Examples of Cuban Spanish:
| /l/ or /r/ + /f/ | → | [ff] | a[ff]iler, hue[ff]ano | (Sp.,) | |
| /l/ or /r/ + /h/ | → | [ɦh] | ana[ɦh]ésico, vi[ɦh]en | (Sp.,) | |
| /l/ or /r/ + /b/ | → | [bb] | si[bb]a, cu[bb]a | (Sp. or,) | |
| /l/ or /r/ + /d/ | → | [dd] | ce[dd]a, acue[dd]o | (Sp. or,) | |
| /l/ or /r/ + /g/ | → | [gg] | pu[gg]a, la[gg]a | (Sp. or,) | |
| /l/ or /r/ + /m/ | → | [mm] | ca[mm]a, a[mm]a | (Sp., or) | |
| /l/ or /r/ + /n/ | → | [nn] | pie[nn]a, ba[nn]eario | (Sp.,) | |
| /l/ or /r/ + /l/ | → | [ll] | bu[ll]a, cha[ll]a | (Sp.,) |
Luganda (a Bantu language) is unusual in that gemination can occur word-initially, as well as word-medially. For example, Ganda: kkapa pronounced as //kːapa// 'cat', pronounced as //ɟːaɟːa// Ganda: jjajja 'grandfather' and pronounced as //ɲːabo// Ganda: nnyabo 'madam' all begin with geminate consonants.
There are three consonants that cannot be geminated: pronounced as //j//, pronounced as //w// and pronounced as //l//. Whenever morphological rules would geminate these consonants, pronounced as //j// and pronounced as //w// are prefixed with pronounced as //ɡ//, and pronounced as //l// changes to pronounced as //d//. For example:
In Japanese, consonant length is distinctive (as is vowel length). Gemination in the syllabary is represented with the sokuon, a small :[18] for hiragana in native words and for katakana in foreign words. For example, means 'came; arrived', while means 'cut; sliced'. With the influx of gairaigo ('foreign words') into Modern Japanese, voiced consonants have become able to geminate as well:[19] means '(computer) bug', and means 'bag'. Distinction between voiceless gemination and voiced gemination is visible in pairs of words such as (meaning 'kit') and (meaning 'kid'). In addition, in some variants of colloquial Modern Japanese, gemination may be applied to some adjectives and adverbs (regardless of voicing) in order to add emphasis: ('amazing') contrasts with ('
In Turkish gemination is indicated by two identical letters as in most languages that have phonemic gemination.
Loanwords originally ending with a phonemic geminated consonant are always written and pronounced without the ending gemination as in Arabic.
Although gemination is resurrected when the word takes a suffix.
Gemination also occurs when a suffix starting with a consonant comes after a word that ends with the same consonant.
In Malayalam, compounding is phonologically conditioned[20] called as sandhi and gemination occurs at word boundaries. Gemination sandhi is called dvitva sandhi or 'doubling sandhi'.
Consider following example:
Gemination also occurs in a single morpheme like Malayalam: കള്ളം which has a different meaning from Malayalam: കളം .
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 Estonian: linna < *Estonian: linnan 'of the city' vs. overlong Estonian: linna < *Estonian: linnaan < *Estonian: linnahen 'to the city'.
See also: Finnish phonology.
Consonant length is phonemic in Finnish, for example Finnish: takka in Finnish pronounced as /ˈtɑkːɑ/ ('fireplace', transcribed with the length sign pronounced as /[ː]/ or with a doubled letter pronounced as /[ˈtɑkkɑ]/) and Finnish: taka pronounced as /[ˈtɑkɑ]/ ('back'). Consonant gemination occurs with simple consonants (Finnish: hakaa : Finnish: hakkaa) and between syllables in the pattern (consonant)-vowel-sonorant-stop-stop-vowel (Finnish: palkka) but not generally in codas or with longer syllables. (This occurs in Sami languages and in the Finnish name Finnish: Jouhkki, which is of Sami origin.) Sandhi often produces geminates.
Both consonant and vowel gemination are phonemic, and both occur independently, e.g. Finnish: Mali, Finnish: maali, Finnish: malli, Finnish: maallinen (Karelian surname, 'paint', 'model', and 'secular').
In Standard Finnish, consonant gemination of pronounced as /[h]/ exists only in interjections, new loan words and in the playful word hihhuli, with its origins in the 19th century, and derivatives of that word.
In many Finnish dialects there are also the following types of special gemination in connection with long vowels: the southwestern special gemination, with lengthening of stops + shortening of long vowel, of the type Finnish: leipää < Finnish: leippä; the common gemination, with lengthening of all consonants in short, stressed syllables, of the type Finnish: putoaa > Finnish: puttoo and its extension (which is strongest in the northwestern Savonian dialects); the eastern dialectal special gemination, which is the same as the common gemination but also applies to unstressed syllables and certain clusters, of the types Finnish: lehmiä > Finnish: lehmmii and Finnish: maksetaan > Finnish: maksettaan.
In Wagiman, an indigenous Australian language, consonant length in stops is the primary phonetic feature that differentiates fortis and lenis stops. Wagiman does not have phonetic voice. Word-initial and word-final stops never contrast for length.
In written language, consonant length 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 shadda in Arabic, the dagesh in Classical Hebrew, or the sokuon in Japanese.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, long consonants are normally written using the triangular colon pronounced as /ː/, e.g. pronounced as /[penːe]/ ('feathers', 'pens', also a kind of pasta), though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying phonemic forms, or in tone languages to facilitate diacritic marking).
Doubled orthographic consonants do not always indicate a long phonetic consonant.