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Also, tonal contour may reinforce the length, as in Estonian, where the over-long length is concomitant with a tonal variation resembling tonal stress marking. In transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet , long vowels or consonants are notated with the length sign (ː Unicode U+02D0 MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLON) after the letter.
Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels are always in stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length, which gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long ...
In some languages, like Italian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Luganda, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. A short vowel within a stressed syllable almost always precedes a long consonant or a consonant cluster, and a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant.
Fortis stops in Australian Aboriginal languages such as Rembarunga (see Ngalakgan) also involve length, with short consonants having weak contact and intermittent voicing, and long consonants having full closure, a more powerful release burst, and no voicing. It is not clear if strength makes the consonants long, or if during long consonants ...
However, because consonant length is no longer contrastive, doubled consonants are purely an orthographical device to indicate vowel length. Long vowels in closed syllables are doubled, and consonants are doubled following short vowels in open syllables even when it is not etymological.
Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered by consonant loss may be considered an extreme form of fusion (Crowley 1997:46).
In most analyses, consonant length is seen as phonemic while vowel length is seen as determined entirely by environment, with long vowels occurring in stressed syllables before single consonants and before certain sequences formed of a consonant plus [v r j], and short vowels occurring elsewhere. Note that diphthongs also occur long and short.
Sonority is loosely defined as the loudness of speech sounds relative to other sounds of the same pitch, length and stress, [1] therefore sonority is often related to rankings for phones to their amplitude. [2] For example, pronouncing the vowel [a] will produce a louder sound than the stop [t], so [a] would rank higher in the hierarchy.