Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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 ...
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 ...
Monosyllabic nouns ending in a consonant receive an epenthetic final /e/. Cf. /ˈrem/ > /ˈren/ > /ˈrene/ > French rien. [30] Phonemic vowel length gradually collapses via the following changes (which only affect vowel length, not quality): [31] Long vowels shorten in unstressed syllables. Long vowels shorten in stressed closed syllables.
Estonian, in which the phonemic opposition is the strongest, uses tonal contour as a secondary cue to distinguish the two; "over-long" is falling as in other Finnic languages, but "half-long" is rising. Finnish also denotes stress principally by adding more length (approximately 100 ms) to the vowel of the syllable nucleus. This means that ...
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).
Fortis and lenis consonants may be distinguished by tenseness or other characteristics, such as voicing, aspiration, glottalization, velarization, length, and length of nearby vowels. Fortis and lenis were coined for languages where the contrast between sounds such as 'p' and 'b' does not involve voicing (vibration of the vocal cords ).