[Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?

[Ian Maddieson]

To directly address Florian’s original question — I don’t know of any large scale study looking at the distribution
of vowel and consonant length. As Misha remarked, there are definitional issues to consider. In the majority of
language descriptions my impression is that ‘double’ consonants are far more frequently analyzed as a sequence of
two consonants, often heterosyllabic, rather than as long consonants. In my own database work double consonants
are most often interpreted this way. On the other hand vowel length is most often treated as a property of a subset
of the vowel inventory, rather than the result of concatenation of two identical vowels — but with some cases where
this is the preferred interpretation, especially if there is a morpheme boundary between the two vowels. 

My impression is that there is no implication that geminate (usually heterosyllabic) consonants imply presence of long 
vowels in the same language. There seem to be fair numbers of languages with long vowels but no double consonants and 
of languages with double consonants but no vowel length. A few examples of the latter are Toba Batak, Burarra, Koryak,
Tashlhiyt, Logudorese Sardinian, Moroccan Arabic, Yaqui, Koromfe, Mada (of Cameroun), Makassarese, Emmi, Ghomara
Berber, Western Pantar, 

Ian





> On Dec 20, 2020, at 09:13, <florian.matter at isw.unibe.ch> <florian.matter at isw.unibe.ch> wrote:
> 
> 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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Ian Maddieson

Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
MSC03-2130
Albuquerque NM 87131-0001




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