[Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?
Larry M. HYMAN
hyman at berkeley.edu
Sun Dec 20 19:33:16 UTC 2020
I have the same impression as Juergen that languages with a vowel length
contrast are vastly more numerous than those with a single/geminate
consonant contrast. (I could only think of Italian, myself, as having only
the latter, though good to see the others cited). On the other hand, the
few languages I have worked with that have geminates also have a vowel
length contrast, e.g. Luganda, Leggbó (with a fortis-lenis contrast that is
largely durational).
On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 10:03 AM Bohnemeyer, Juergen <jb77 at buffalo.edu>
wrote:
> 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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> >>
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> --
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
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--
Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director,
France-Berkeley Fund
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=19
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