[Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?

Sun Dec 20 18:03:47 UTC 2020

Dear Florian,
Following up on Misha's remark, there are indeed many East Caucasian
languages with consonant length but no vowel length. More interestingly,
they cluster areally, being found most clearly in the Eastern part of the
map (Lezgian, Agul, Tabasaran, Lak, Southern Dargwa), while languages with
a balanced mix of consonant and vowel length are found only in the West
(Chechen, some Andic languages).
Best
GA

On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 6:43 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _____________________________
>>>>
>>>> Universität Bern
>>>>
>>>> Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
>>>>
>>>> Florian Matter
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Länggassstrasse 49
>>>>
>>>> CH-3012 Bern
>>>>
>>>> Tel. +41 31 631 37 54
>>>>
>>>> Raum B 168
>>>>
>>>> *florian.matter at isw.unibe.ch <florian.matter at isw.unibe.ch>*
>>>>
>>>> *http://www.isw.unibe.ch <http://www.isw.unibe.ch/>*
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>
>
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