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Encyclopedia > Consonant length

In phonetics, consonant length is when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture of the vocal tract sufficient to cause audible turbulence. ...


Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Italian, Japanese, Arabic and Finnish. Most languages (including English) do not have distinctive long consonants. 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". The Arabic language ( ), or simply Arabic ( ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew, Amharic and Aramaic. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... In Quebec, an allophone (French or English. ...

Contents

Consonant length in phonetics

Lengthened fricatives, nasals, approximants, and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the "hold" is prolonged. Long consonants are usually around one and a half or two times as long as short consonants, depending on the language. Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. ... A nasal consonant is produced when the velum&#8212;that fleshy part of the palate near the back&#8212;is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ... Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants. ... In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. ... A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ...


Writing

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, or small tsu in Japanese. Estonian uses 'b', 'd', 'g' for short consonants, and 'p', 't', 'k' and 'pp', 'tt', 'kk' are used for long consonants. A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... Japanese writing Kanji Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana Manyogana Uses Furigana Okurigana Rōmaji The sokuon (Japanese: ) is a Japanese symbol consisting of a small hiragana or katakana tsu. ...


In the International Phonetic Alphabet, long consonants are normally written using the triangular colon ː, e.g. [penːe], though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying phonemic forms). For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ... A colon (:) is a punctuation mark, visually consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line. ... In spoken language, a phoneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words (i. ...


In Hungarian, when two characters are put together to make a different sound, they are considered only one letter - for example, sz is one consonant that makes the sound 's'. This can be 'doubled' by writing ssz, not szsz. Cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, ty and zs work the same way: ccs, ddz, ggy, lly, nny, tty and zzs, respectively. The only Hungarian trigraph, dzs, can be geminated by ddzs. (B, c, d, etc. - 'bb', 'cc', 'dd', and so on.) A trigraph (from the Greek words tria = three and grapho = write) is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound. ...


Long consonants can also be a spelling phenomenon, as in English words like "running" where there is no lengthening of the consonant in actual speech. However, consonant digraphs are used in English to indicate the preceding vowel is a 'lax' vowel, while a single letter often allows a 'tense' vowel to occur. For example, "tapping" /tæpɪŋ/ (from "tap") has a "short A" /æ/, which is distinct from the diphthong "long A" /eɪ/ in "taping" /teɪpɪŋ/ (from "tape").


In English

In the English phonology, consonant length 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", "still-life". 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". English phonology is the study of the phonology (ie the sound system) of the English language. ...


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 Russian language, consonant length may occur in several ways. Russian (Russian: ,  ) is the most widely spoken language of Eurasia and the most widespread of the Slavonic languages. ...

In languages such as Swedish or Italian, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. That is, a short vowel must be followed by a long consonant, whereas a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. Consonant length is phonemic in Italian, e.g. penne [ˈpen.ne], a type of pasta (see penne), but pene [ˈpɛːne] "penis". Luganda has exactly the same rule. A bathtub A bathtub (or simply bath) is a plumbing fixture used for bathing. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Conjugation may refer to: Grammatical conjugation, the modification of runnign a verb from its basic form Latin conjugation, Spanish conjugation and The English verb, each with complex conjugation forms Marriage, relationship between two individuals In mathematics: Complex conjugation, the operation which multiplies the imaginary part of a complex number by... Length is the long dimension of any object. ... Wiktionary has related dictionary definitions, such as: long Long may mean: long integer, a type variable in computer science long (finance), a position in finance Another name for the Chinese dragon, a mythical creature in Chinese mythology Long is the name of: Long Island, an island in New York, United... Extremes on Land See also List of mountains. ... You may be looking for something of the following: computer software hard Kelly v. ... In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. ... Penne rigate (ridged penne) Penne are a type of pasta originating in Italy. ... Luganda is a Bantu language and is spoken mainly in Uganda by the people of Buganda. ...


In other languages, such as Finnish or Japanese, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, consonant length 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 consonant length is also affected by consonant gradation. Another important phenomenon is that sandhi produces long consonants to word boundaries from an archiphonemic glottal stop, for example ota' seotas_se "take it!" In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. ... Proto-Finno-Ugric is the reconstructed protolanguage for the Finno-Ugric languages, that is the ancestor of the Samic languages or Finnic languages, such as Finnish, and the Ugric languages, whose best known example is Hungarian. ... Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation, in which consonants alternate between various grades. It is found in some Finno-Lappic languages such as Finnish, Estonian and Sámi; moreover, the Votic language is known for its extensive set of gradation patterns. ... Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. ... The glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages. ...


Distinctive consonant length is usually restricted to certain consonants. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among them are Pattani Malay, Chuukese, a few Romance languages such as Sicilian and Neapolitan, and many of the High Alemannic German dialects (such as Thurgovian). Some African languages, such as Setswana and Luganda, also have initial consonant length—in fact initial consonant length is very common in Luganda and is used to indicate certain grammatical features. In spoken Finnish, long consonants are produced between words by sandhi effects. Chuukese (also called Trukese) is a Trukic language of the Austronesian language family spoken primarily on the islands of Chuuk in the Caroline Islands in Micronesia. ... The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... Sicilian (, Italian: ) is the Romance language spoken in Sicily and southern Italy. ... Neapolitan (autonym: nnapulitano; Italian: napoletano) is a Romance language spoken in the city and region of Naples, Campania (Neapolitan: Nàpule, Italian: Napoli), as well as throughout most of southern Italy including the Gaeta and Sora districts of southern Lazio, the southern part of Ascoli province in Marche, most of... High Alemannic is a branch of Alemannic dialects and belongs to the German language, even though they are only partly intelligible to German speakers. ... Tswana, also known as Setswana, is a Bantu language. ... Luganda is a Bantu language and is spoken mainly in Uganda by the people of Buganda. ... Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. ... This article deals with features of the spoken Finnish language, specifically how it is spoken in Greater Helsinki capital region and the cities in the Central Finnish dialectal area, such as Jyväskylä, Lahti, Hyvinkää, and Hämeenlinna. ... Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. ...


In Hungarian, consonant length is distinctive. For example megy means go, while meggy means sour cherry.


In Ancient Greek, consonant length was distinctive. The distinction has been lost in Modern Greek except in a few dialects. The Greek language (Greek &#917;&#955;&#955;&#951;&#957;&#953;&#954;&#940;, IPA // &#8211; Hellenic) is an Indo-European language with a documented history of some 3,000 years. ... Main article: Greek language Modern Greek (Νέα Ελληνικά or Νεοελληνική, lit. ...


See also

West Germanic Gemination is a sound change that took place in all West Germanic languages, around 300 AD. All single consonants except /r/ were doubled after a short vowel and before /j/; sometimes also before /w/, /r/, and /l/. A similar change occurred in the history of Old Norse, but... The glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages. ... In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that are distinctively longer than other sounds. ... A acoustic phonetics affricate airstream mechanism allophone alveolar approximant alveolar consonant alveolar ejective fricative alveolar ejective alveolar flap alveolar nasal alveolar ridge alveolar trill alveolo-palatal consonant apical consonant approximant consonant articulatory phonetics aspiration auditory phonetics B back vowel bilabial click bilabial consonant bilabial ejective bilabial nasal bilabial trill breathy...

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