[Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?
Bohnemeyer, Juergen
jb77 at buffalo.edu
Sun Dec 20 18:02:49 UTC 2020
Dear all — Just for the sake of speculation, let me propose a possible causal link. The argument has multiple steps:
1. Presumably (but I haven’t looked at this empirically), length contrasts are easier to perceive in vowels than in consonants. And as a result, their production would also be easier to monitor and control in vowels than in consonants.
2. If the above is correct, then it would also stand to reason that phonemic length contrasts are more likely to occur in vowels than in consonants.
3. This in turn would mean that a likely scenario for the emergence of phonemic duration in consonants is that the members of a language community first become habituated to perceiving duration contrasts in vowels, and from there extend this type of categorization to consonant phonemes.
Since we’ve already seen examples of languages with phonemic duration in consonants only in this thread, it is probably not the case that the emergence of phonemic duration in consonants presupposed the prior existence of phonemic duration in vowels. However, it is of course also conceivable that languages first acquire phonemic duration in vowels, then extend it to consonants, and then reinterpret duration contrasts in vowels as tone or quality contrasts, leaving the quantity opposition in consonants orphaned.
Like I said, all idle speculation. — Best — Juergen
> On Dec 20, 2020, at 12:42 PM, Pier Marco Bertinetto <piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it> wrote:
>
> Dear Florian,
> the question I would ask myself is the following: Since we know that vowel and consonant quantity are independent of each other (they can coexist, or one can have phonological value and the other, possibly, a mere allophonically conditioned behavior), does it make sense to look for an "implicational tendency"?
> Unless one can prove that the existence of consonant quantity presupposes vowel quantity, I would leave out any "implicational" reasoning.
> Needless to say, it might be interesting to know, say, that there are more languages with vowel quantity than languages with consonant quantity, but would this teach us anything more than a mere statistical fact?
> Best
> Pier Marco
>
>
> Il giorno dom 20 dic 2020 alle ore 18:17 Hartmut Haberland <hartmut at ruc.dk> ha scritto:
> Apparent counterexamples seem to be Italian (no vowel length) and maybe Japanese (long vowels in Sinojapanese vocabulary like sū ‘number’ seem to be genuine but in suu ‘sucks, inhales’ with a morpheme border it is often considered u+u. Both languages have long/double consonants.
>
>> Den 20. dec. 2020 kl. 17.49 skrev Michael Daniel <misha.daniel at gmail.com>:
>>
>>
>> ps Sorry, i shouldn't have sent it to the general list. I am aware that individual cases do not undermine the general correlation. But because Florian also asked for language-level evidence, I provided (my understanding of) the data I know of.
>>
>> Michael Daniel
>>
>> вс, 20 дек. 2020 г., 19:25 Michael Daniel <misha.daniel at gmail.com>:
>> Dear Florian,
>>
>> i guess this depends on how to define consonant length, and what to count as presence of vowel quantity contrast. In East Caucasian, many languages distinguish between geminate vs simple, alias strong vs weak, alias fortis vs lenis, alias non-aspirated vs aspirated stops.
>>
>> At the same time, vowel length, if present at all, is much less central to the system, though this varies across languages. I'm afraid, in order to fully assess the force of this implication, you should somehow account also for the role of the two contrasts in the language.
>>
>> As one example, there is an important contrast between fortis and lenis stops in Archi, Lezgic. Vowel length is also present, but is used in expressive elements such as distance demonstratives; secondarily as compensation for the loss of the intervocalic -q- in one (of several hundred) of verbal forms; in some morphophonological contexts with the coordinative clitic; and maybe in one or two other forms that do not quickly come to my mind.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Michael
>>
>> вс, 20 дек. 2020 г., 19:13 <florian.matter at isw.unibe.ch>:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> is anybody aware of large-scale studies investigating the distribution of contrastive length in consonants and vowels? Preliminary analysis of phoible data tells me that there is an implicational tendency where if a language has contrastive length in consonants, it also has it in vowels. Are there studies supporting this? I’m also interested in literature on the geographical and genealogical distribution of contrastive length.
>>
>> Best,
>> Florian
>>
>>
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Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
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