Gemination in triliteral languages

[alice]

Some formations in Semitic languages geminate the second consonant of the root to express "intensive" meanings and the like. Are there any, not necessarily in Semitic, which geminate the first or third consonant?

[Mecislau]

Nothing where that's the primary distinguishing feature. You do see productive C1 or C2 gemination in some languages, but always as the result of assimilation. For instance, the addition of the definite article *ha- in Hebrew generally causes gemination of the following consonant (C1), but that's just the result of assimilation from an earlier *han- or *hal-.

[Cathbad]

Nothing where that's the primary distinguishing feature. You do see productive C1 or C2 gemination in some languages, but always as the result of assimilation. For instance, the addition of the definite article *ha- in Hebrew generally causes gemination of the following consonant (C1), but that's just the result of assimilation from an earlier *han- or *hal-.

Yes. In Arabic, it is exactly the same for al-, and (similarly?) roots which assimilate C1 itself - e.g. mutta7id (< *muwta7id).

[chris_notts]

Some formations in Semitic languages geminate the second consonant of the root to express "intensive" meanings and the like. Are there any, not necessarily in Semitic, which geminate the first or third consonant?

Some Austronesian languages geminate the initial consonant of verbs to express certain meanings. The origin of this was reduplication of the initial CV- of the root, followed by a sound change that deleted unstressed vowels between identical consonants.

Word initial geminates in general are fairly unusual because they are difficult to percieve unless there is a preceding word that ends in a vowel, but they also occur in languages like Trique (The origin in Trique was, again, deletion of some word initial syllables).

Incidentally, the development of word initial geminates (which are then lost in various ways) occurs in a conlang I'm currently working on.

[Ser]

Some formations in Semitic languages geminate the second consonant of the root to express "intensive" meanings and the like. Are there any, not necessarily in Semitic, which geminate the first or third consonant?

In Arabic as already mentioned the first is often geminated because the /l/ in the article al- gets assimilated to the following coronal consonant (or even other non-coronal consonants depending on dialect, e.g. velars in Cairene Arabic (eg-gamal), labials in some Central Asian kind of Arabic...).

There's many words whose C2 and C3 are the same, producing CVCC words: جر /dʒarr/ 'pulling', عامّ /ʕaamm/ 'public'.

[Astraios]

Something like Archi has initial geminates, and Maltese does (but always following a vowel: hi ssir she becomes ~ int issir you become, where the initial i- is epenthetic). Maltese also has final ones like Arabic.

[Simmalti]

Something like Archi has initial geminates, and Maltese does (but always following a vowel: hi ssir she becomes ~ int issir you become, where the initial i- is epenthetic). Maltese also has final ones like Arabic.

Yes, and initial gemination can also change the meaning. The example that comes to mind is:
sakkar - he locked
(i)ssakkar - he got locked

[Ser]

I just found that Moroccan Arabic has instances like that:

[sˤef] '(a) sword'
[sˤːef] 'the sword'

Also interesting:

[ħʷl̩:] 'Open!'
[ħl̩:] 'solution' (yes, the ‹l› is a lowercase ‹L›)

[Astraios]

In Berber too. But there at least there there are schwas.

[Ser]

In Berber too. But there at least there there are schwas.

In Moroccan Arabic there's epenthetic shwas too: /dˤarˤ/ [dˤɑrˤ] 'a house', /dˤːarˤ/ [ɐdˤːɑrˤ] 'the house'.