[Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?
Mark Donohue
mhdonohue at gmail.com
Mon Dec 21 09:01:08 UTC 2020
We're starting to (possibly not without some motivation) confuse syllabic
consonants with geminate consonants.
hmm
is easy, and not that unusual, cross linguistically, but
ma ≠ mma
is much more rarely attested.
(I'm agreeing with previous comments that amma can in most cases be thought
of as am-ma, VCCV.)
-Mark
On Mon, 21 Dec 2020 at 19:57, Haig, Geoffrey <geoffrey.haig at uni-bamberg.de>
wrote:
> Exactly. If it's not difficult to produce these items, we might expect a
> length distinction with e.g. [m] to be among the more frequent examples of
> phonemic length distinctions among consonants in the languages of the
> world. Don't see a lot of evidence for it though. Or the production
> argument is not the whole story.
> I guess one might consider a phonemic distinction between tap and trilled
> rhotic to be a length distinction, but not sure what the phoneticians say.
>
>
>
> **************************************
> Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Haig
> Lehrstuhl Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
> Institut fuer Orientalistik
> Universität Bamberg
> Schillerplatz 17
> 96047 Bamberg
>
> Tel. ++49 (0)951 863 2490
> Admin. ++49 (0)951 863 2491
>
> https://www.uni-bamberg.de/aspra/team/aktuelles-team/prof-dr-geoffrey-haig/
>
>
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Frans Plank <frans.plank at ling-phil.ox.ac.uk>
> Gesendet: Montag, 21. Dezember 2020 09:41
> An: Haig, Geoffrey <geoffrey.haig at uni-bamberg.de>
> Cc: <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >
> Betreff: Re: [Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?
>
> hmmm.
>
>
>
> > On 21. Dec 2020, at 08:34, Haig, Geoffrey <geoffrey.haig at uni-bamberg.de>
> wrote:
> >
> > Dear All,
> > There seems to be a general consensus that length contrasts in
> consonants are in some sense more difficult to produce, and to perceive,
> than in vowels.
> > As a non-phonetician (sorry if this is just naïve) I am wondering
> > about this. After all, it doesn't seem to me that problematic to
> > produce, and perceive, different lengths of certain sonorants, [m] or
> > [r] for example, or certain fricatives. So if the issue was grounded
> > in articulatory or perceptual constraints, we would presumably expect
> > these consonants to be the ones that are most frequently exploited in
> > consonantal length distinctions. I wonder if there's any evidence for
> > that (I can't think of any myself), Best Geoff
> >
> >
> >
> > **************************************
> > Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Haig
> > Lehrstuhl Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Institut fuer Orientalistik
> > Universität Bamberg Schillerplatz 17
> > 96047 Bamberg
> >
> > Tel. ++49 (0)951 863 2490
> > Admin. ++49 (0)951 863 2491
> >
> > https://www.uni-bamberg.de/aspra/team/aktuelles-team/prof-dr-geoffrey-
> > haig/
> >
> > -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> > Von: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> Im Auftrag
> > von Bohnemeyer, Juergen
> > Gesendet: Sonntag, 20. Dezember 2020 19:03
> > An: <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> > <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> > Betreff: Re: [Lingtyp] Contrastive vowel and consonant length?
> >
> > 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> _____________________________
> >>> 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
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> >>
> >> --
> >> =========================================================
> >>
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> >> =========================================================
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> >>
> >> webpage <https://www.sns.it/it/bertinetto-pier-marco
> >>>
> >> "Laboratorio di Linguistica" <
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> >>>
> >> =========================================================
> >>
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> >
> >
> > --
> > Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> > Professor, Department of Linguistics
> > University at Buffalo
> >
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