Card wrote and made me smile: Don't read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemination
________________________________ From: "cardemais...@yahoo.com" <cardemais...@yahoo.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 9:01 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Classical Hebrew and Arabic Been listening to the Old Testament (Tanakh: torah, nevi'im, ketuvim) for a couple of hours now. One of the main reasons whyClassical Hebrew, more than modern Hebrew, sounds somewhat like Arabic (at least to me), might well be gemination: In phonetics, gemination or consonant elongation happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Gemination is distinct from stress and may appear independently of it. Gemination literally means "twinning", and is from the same Latin root as "Gemini". Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Arabic, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Classical Hebrew, Hungarian, Catalan, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Russian, Slovak and Tamil. Most languages (includingEnglish) do not have distinctive long consonants. Vowel length is distinctive in more languages than consonant length, although several languages feature both independently (as in Japanese, Finnish, and Estonian), or have interdependent vowel and consonant length (as in Norwegian and Swedish). Don't read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemination