[Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?
Johanna Nichols
johanna at berkeley.edu
Sun Dec 20 22:00:45 UTC 2020
Ingush (Nakh-Daghestanian), has a length contrast in vowels and
geminate consonants cognate to the Daghestanian ones that Misha and
Gilles mention. The geminate consonants behave like a sequence of two
consonants, with the first one closing the preceding syllable and
shortening the vowel, and the second one opening the following
syllable. In some Chechen varieties, the situation is similar, though
with geminates the consonant that opens the following syllable is
unaspirated while in most Chechen vowels a single voiceless stop or
obstruent is aspirated. I think this is the only respect in which the
geminate do not behave like a sequence (or more precisely they don't
behave like a sequence of the corresponding single consonants). But
I've heard one Chechen variety where vowel length is preserved before
geminates and the geminate is aspirated.
In Saami (Uralic) varieties there are vowel length oppositions and (as
I understand it) consonants written as double but which apparently do
not behave in any respect as sequences: they don't shorten preceding
long vowels and in gradation they are the strong grade of single
consonants. This is different from Finnish, where double consonants
behave like sequences in that they close the preceding syllable and
cause weak grade in its first consonant, but they do not shorten long
vowels and in gradation they behave like the strong grade of a
consonant alternating with a single consonant as weak grade.
Johanna
On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 1:11 PM Pier Marco Bertinetto
<piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it> wrote:
>
> A possible source of phonologically long Cs is total assimilation of C clusters.
> I doubt that V quantity could have an impact on that.
> Best
> Pier Marco
>
>
> Il giorno dom 20 dic 2020 alle ore 20:59 Peter Austin <pa2 at soas.ac.uk> ha scritto:
>>
>> 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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>>>> >>
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>
>
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> =========================================================
> |||| Pier Marco Bertinetto
> ------ professore emerito
> /////// Scuola Normale Superiore
> ------- p.za dei Cavalieri 7
> /////// I-56126 PISA
> ------- phone: +39 050 509111
> ///////
> ------- HOME
> /////// via Matteotti 197
> ------- I-55049 Viareggio LU
> /////// phone: +39 0584 652417
> ------- cell.: +39 368 3830251
> =========================================================
> editor of "Italian Journal of Linguistics"
> webpage <https://www.sns.it/it/bertinetto-pier-marco>
> "Laboratorio di Linguistica" <http://linguistica.sns.it>
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