Card wrote and made me smile: Don't read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemination
From: "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
