Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 April 11

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April 11

Unique phonology

I recently discovered that apparently Syntactic gemination is limited to only two languages: standard Italian (and some Italian "dialects") & Finnish. It was a surprise. I thought that it was much more common. Are there phonetical phenomena taking place in just one single language (or in just one small group of closely related languages)? --195.62.160.60 (talk) 09:46, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Knowing that every language is unique, there are tons of such. Check out Category:English phonology for a list of phenomena that have their own articles. Some of them, such as the L-vocalization, are also seen elsewhere, but others, such as the trisyllabic laxing, are purely English. --Theurgist (talk) 11:04, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

195.62.160.60 -- I doubt that it's confined to those two languages only, since the same thing happens in Masoretic Biblical Hebrew (in somewhat restricted circumstances) -- see section 20.2 of Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley (online at Wikisource here and subsequent pages, though I can't vouch for how correctly it's been transcribed into that form, and the GKC explanation can be difficult to understand if you don't have some linguistic background in the Hebrew language). AnonMoos (talk) 12:35, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Tamil has a similar phenomenon, where a word-initial stop is doubled in certain contexts (after particular words, after certain inflectional suffixes, and in compounds). --Jbuchholz (talk) 06:42, 12 April 2023 (UTC)