Advice on gemination?

[Viktor77]

Hello, I am taking private Hungarian lessons but since my teacher is a native Hungarian speaking friend and this is our first time trying to do Hungarian lessons it is not so easy to make precise how to go about actually forming and pronouncing various phenomena, especially geminates. We have a book but it's pretty much useless in this regard.

I basically cannot figure out for the life of me how to go about pronouncing any of the geminates except the nasals, ficatives, and affricates. Is there any advice you can give on how to form and practice geminates? I'm finding this very hard as an anglophone for stops and palatals.

[Dezinaa]

AFAIK, geminates sound basically the same as two of the same consonant in a row. Like the <...t t...> English <hat take> [hæt:eɪk] or the <...g g...> in <bug game> [bʌg:eɪm]. Just make sure the first one is not released.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

[gach]

They are just longer versions of the short or single consonants. Essentially you keep your mouth still for a longer time when pronouncing them and make sure that there's no extra release during the geminate. How much longer than single consonants depends from language to language but if there's only a two way distinction in length, as there is in Hungarian, getting the geminates and long vowels slightly too long or short won't really affect at all how you are understood. The best way to get the lengths right is to listen to native speakers and copy their speech.

The geminates that Dezinaa mentions which you can get across word boundaries in English are also a good place to look.

[Viktor77]

Thank you for the advice. It is working, my pronunciation is coming along! It's still most difficult for me to produce the distinction between [a] and [A] as I come from a dialect where these vowels are very fronted.

[Qwynegold]

Thank you for the advice. It is working, my pronunciation is coming along! It's still most difficult for me to produce the distinction between [a] and [A] as I come from a dialect where these vowels are very fronted.

Isn't it [a] vs [Q:], or was it [Q] vs [a:]? Anyway, you've got the rounded one in some dialects of English, right? Can you imitate that?

[Viktor77]

Thank you for the advice. It is working, my pronunciation is coming along! It's still most difficult for me to produce the distinction between [a] and [A] as I come from a dialect where these vowels are very fronted.

Isn't it [a] vs [Q:], or was it [Q] vs [a:]? Anyway, you've got the rounded one in some dialects of English, right? Can you imitate that?

It is actually [a:] versus [Q] so you are partially correct. The problem is my [a] is so fronted it is basically [{], and located just slightly front of [E]. To simplify things I have decided to not rectify this, though I will try to lax it a bit. I decided to substitute [A] for [Q], though because my [A] is almost mid, it isn't so bad.

[sirdanilot]

Hello, I am taking private Hungarian lessons but since my teacher is a native Hungarian speaking friend and this is our first time trying to do Hungarian lessons it is not so easy to make precise how to go about actually forming and pronouncing various phenomena, especially geminates. We have a book but it's pretty much useless in this regard.

I basically cannot figure out for the life of me how to go about pronouncing any of the geminates except the nasals, ficatives, and affricates. Is there any advice you can give on how to form and practice geminates? I'm finding this very hard as an anglophone for stops and palatals.

Just keep your mouth still for a longer while than with a normal /t/. It's not that hard really. Geminate obstruents are just 'held' longer before they are released, the audible duration of the actual burst of the [t:] isn't longer than for a normal /t/, just the time of 'silence' before the burst is longer.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

In Japanese, a geminated consonant is simply keeping your tongue in place longer than for a non-geminated one. For plosives, it's a longer stop of airflow while for other consonants, it's letting the air pass, put keeping your tongue in space.

[Viktor77]

Thanks for your advice. I got it down in everything but singing.

[Plaas]

It may help to listen to a few example words in Swedish or Norwegian, both languages that are closely related to English, but preserved gemination, which means that you can hear the geminates in related words. Here you have stopp, which is English "stop" with geminate-p.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Thanks for your advice. I got it down in everything but singing.

In sung Japanese, the preceding vowel is slightly lengthened, and you just retain the consonant slightly longer..

[gach]

I don't think it's good to think about singing at all at this stage. Songs have rhythm which messes with phonemic length and can collapse a whole lot of oppositions that exist in plain spoken language. Similarly I wouldn't expect it to be helpful to worry too much about singing when studying a tonal language.

Now, in my experience consonant length actually preserves relatively well when sung but vowel length may be just completely thrown away. This is for example how it works in Finnish. In it all geminates must appear at syllable boundaries with the beginning and the end of the geminate in different syllables. Thus, however you may stretch or squeeze either of the syllables flanking the geminate, half of it will always be present in either of them and in the and the geminate will stay a geminate; a lengthened consonant which spans over a syllable break. Estonian, on the other hand, distinguishes simple geminates from overlong ones and just paying attention to syllable breaks isn't enough to tell them apart. Consequently I've never been able to identify overlong geminates in sung Estonian.

[clawgrip]

Now, in my experience consonant length actually preserves relatively well when sung but vowel length may be just completely thrown away.

That's funny, because as Yiuel's post hints at, Japanese singing typically does the opposite. Geminate stops in Japanese are often almost entirely replaced by lengthening of the previous vowel, since having a longer vowel sounds nicer than having a stretch of silence.

[gach]

That's entirely possible. My personal experience doesn't include Japanese, especially when sung. It's evidently very language dependent how length gets processed.

By the way, can you point out any evidence that aesthetics is a driving force in the replacement of geminates by vowel lengthening in Japanese? I'm speaking in the context of Finnic where both vowel and consonant length carry heavy semantic load and it's against my intuition that simply pleasing the ear would motivate a change between them any more than for example swapping one consonant with another one.

[Qwynegold]

From what I can tell from anime intros, some types of singing do like e.g. /kis:aten/ [ki.is.sa.te.n:].

[clawgrip]

Gemination is very important in Japanese as well, and maybe my phrasing was slightly poor, but in singing geminate consonants are not entirely eliminated. Generally, the preceding vowel is lengthened, but there is usually just enough of the following geminate to make it clear, as Qwynegold points out. This is probably helped by the fact that long vowels are relatively infrequently followed by geminate consonants, so if enough of the geminate is recognizable then it's unlikely to cause confusion. Any other possible confusion can usually be resolved from context. This sort of replacement is more evident the slower and more melodic the singing, which is why I imagine it has to do with aesthetics.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

What clawgrip wrote.

Japanese geminate vowels and consonants hardly happen together, this may explain how Japanese handles them in songs and poetry.

Also, phonemic length is quite a novelty in Japanese; the fact all derive from previous weird combinations show that Japanese, in the past, probably did not encounter much issue with phonemic length. Qwynegold's ear hints at how the Japanese actually pronounce all of it. (I never formally learned how to pronounce all these nifty little long vowels and consonants, but it seems I get it the Japanese way pretty well.)