XPost: alt.usage.english   
   From: wugi@brol.invalid   
      
   Op 18/12/2025 om 19:24 schreef Stefan Ram:   
   > There are sometimes extra rules for singing, so let's just stick   
   >    to speaking.   
   >   
   >    In Italian, when a consonant doubles, it basically gets longer.   
   >    Textbooks actually cover that part.   
   >   
   >    But the effect that doubling a consonant has on how long the vowel   
   >    before it is - that's a trickier thing. You don't usually see that   
   >    explained in textbooks; it's more of a research topic at this point.   
   >   
   >    The idea that a vowel before a long or double consonant tends   
   >    to be shorter than a vowel before a short consonant isn't really   
   >    consistent. It depends on a bunch of factors, like what kind of   
   >    consonant it is or the word and stress pattern it shows up in.   
      
   Yes. I didn't buy PM's 'build' vs 'built' vowel length remark. One might   
   want to linger a bit more on a 'build' syllable than on a 'built' one,   
   but between 'built' and 'buil-ding' I wouldn't expect any differences in   
   length.   
      
   Spanish is 'known' to have only one occurence of 'the five' vowels, but   
   in practice there are length (esp. in L.-Am.) and timbre (open/closed o   
   and e) differences. The main difference between 'pero' and 'perro' is   
   the vowel e: open in the latter, closed in the former. That's how I   
   prefer to utter them distinctly, I won't bother too much to   
   differentiate -r- and -rr-.   
      
   Spanish is also 'known' to have done away with geminate consonants, also   
   in writing, apart from -ll- and -rr- for their special digraph function.   
   So they've 'oposición, ilegal, inocente, inmortal, inmune'. Still there   
   are 'innovación, innumerable' and similar, and there is, eg, 'obvio', a   
   trendy filler word where I was in Argentina. Those are gemminates   
   alright in Spanish. I saw a shop making a spelling pun of it writing "El   
   Ovbio" (another shop called itself "Al posho" ~pollo, yet another "El   
   Onze" ~once, but to my Flemish eyes that looked really like "Ours").   
      
   --   
   guido wugi   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)