[Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?

Sun Dec 20 19:58:25 UTC 2020

Some Western Micronesian languages have a consonant length contrast,
including word-initially. Among them, Chuukese lacks long vowels but
Pohnpeian has long vowels as well. I understand the consonant length
contrast can be reconstructed for their ancestor.

Peter

On Sun, 20 Dec 2020 at 19:34, Larry M. HYMAN <hyman at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> 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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>> Professor, Department of Linguistics
>> University at Buffalo
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> Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director,
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Prof Peter K. Austin
Emeritus Professor in Field Linguistics, SOAS
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