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With around 22 to 26 phonemes, the German consonant system has an average number of consonants in comparison with other languages. One of the more noteworthy ones is the unusual affricate /pf/ . [ 47 ]
Even though German does not have phonemic consonant length, there are many instances of doubled or even tripled consonants in the spelling. A single consonant following a checked vowel is doubled if another vowel follows, for instance immer 'always', lassen 'let'.
Distinctive consonant length is usually restricted to certain consonants and environments. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among those that do are Pattani Malay, Chuukese, Moroccan Arabic, a few Romance languages such as Sicilian and Neapolitan, as well as many High Alemannic German dialects, such as that of ...
"Fortis" and "lenis" have also been used to refer to contrasts of consonant duration in languages like Jawoyn, [12] Ojibwe, [13] Dalabon, Kunwinjku, [14] and Zurich German. [15] The Zapotec languages are also considered to have contrast of length rather than of voicing. [ 16 ]
Many languages later shortened the long consonants. That had consequences for spelling, as consonant length was generally marked by doubling in the various Germanic languages, but vowel length was not. The doubled consonants then came to be used as an indicator for vowel length and, later, quality.
Kluge's law is a controversial Proto-Germanic sound law formulated by Friedrich Kluge. [1] It purports to explain the origin of the Proto-Germanic long consonants *kk, *tt, and *pp (Proto-Indo-European lacked a phonemic length distinction for consonants) as originating in the assimilation of *n to a preceding voiced plosive consonant, under the condition that the *n was part of a suffix which ...
In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that have distinctively extended duration compared with other sounds. There are long vowels as well as long consonants (the latter are often called geminates). Many languages do not have distinctive length.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration.In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Czech, Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), some Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish and Estonian), Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan ...