Germanic "w"-Gemination. II

Gemination in Hungarian loanword adaptation

An interesting puzzle of Hungarian phonology is gemination in recent loanwords borrowed from English, German (and occasionally, from French). A consonant following a short stressed vowel is often geminated in the loanword, even if the consonant doubling does not have an orthographic reflex in the source word, i.e. the consonant in question is not spelt as a double letter in the source word. Unl...

Prominence and gemination in Ingrian

This paper reports results of an acoustic study of stress and length patterns in Ingrian, a Finnic language closely related to Finnish. Primary stressed syllables were found to have higher fundamental frequency than both secondary stressed and unstressed syllables. Intensity and duration played a limited role in signaling stress. In keeping with published descriptions, consonants preceding a lo...

Consonant Gemination in Japanese Loanword Phonology

The distribution of geminate obstruents in Japanese loanwords appears very complex. Some consonants are more prone to gemination than others, on the one hand, and one and the same consonant is more likely to geminate in some phonological contexts than in others, on the other hand. This paper tackles these problems by considering the relationship between consonant gemination in native words and ...

Cladistic Methodology and West Germanic

For about a century and a half now one of the usual tasks of historical linguistics has been reconstructing the prehistory of linguistic communities. (That is, of course, the side of reconstruction that non-linguists are interested in.) A perennial question is what sort of model of linguistic diversification best fits the data. This paper will explore that question in the light of data supporti...

Gemination and anti-gemination: Meinhof 's law in LuGanda and Kikuyu