Nick Nicholas has been traveling through Greece and Albania and is now in Cyprus, and he’s been posting lots of observations (and photos) on Facebook; I thought this one was interesting enough to reproduce here (in its entirety, so those of you without FB access aren’t missing anything but a couple of menu images):
Burger, transliterated as berker in Cypriot Greek, instead of bernger. Cypriot Greek has a 3-way contrast of kk, k, ng: k is actually the closest the dialect phonology has to a g, whereas Greece Greek increasingly is dropping the n in ng, and has always used NG anyway. Same for nd vs t and mb vs p.
Yes, that is a double tt at the start of ttavas. It’s aspirated word-initially: t(h)avas. Here they make it with rice: in the Nicosia region where my aunt and uncle are from, they use onion instead, so Lefkara ttavas weirds them out. It’s unfamiliar to me, so I’m in.
Ttavas is the Cypriot for tava, the Indian through to Turkish pan that it is prepared in. (Metal in India, clay here.) Turkish t ends up in Cypriot as tt. Hence also eg Turkish kele “head” > Cypriot Greek kkele.
(I’ve added itals and links ad libitum.)
More languages should have word-initial geminate stops. Conlangers, please take note!
@de
My father was a stammerer, so he had a lot of these…
A list illustrating the success of the family of Middle Persian tābag ⟨tʾp̄k’⟩ can be found in the Wiktionary here.
Quite a list!
@Xerib: Could that be related to tabukuk?
Swiss German has “geminates all over the word“, and it doesn’t cheat with aspiration!
The tense series of consonants in Korean is sometimes analyzed as geminates, perhaps influenced by modern orthography. To stick to a food example, 떡 “rice cake” is romanized as tteok.
The tense series developed from erstwhile clusters; 떡 comes from Middle Korean ᄯᅥᆨ (steok to use an arbitrary romanization based on the official system for Modern Korean, or stok to use the Yale romanization). A major debate in the codification of Korean orthography in the early twentieth century was whether to write the tense series as clusters or as geminates, and the latter option prevailed.
Phonologically, it is possible to analyze Korean as having only a single stop or affricate phoneme for each place of articulation, corresponding to the plain series. The aspirated series would then be analyzed as clusters of these plain consonants with /h/, while the tense series would be geminates of the plain consonants. Hence the three-way contrast of ㄷ d /t/, ㅌ t /th/, and ㄸ tt /tt/.
For what it’s worth, the Kontsevich system of Cyrillization for Korean basically adopts this analysis, writing т, тх, and тт respectively in initial position. But in voiced environments, the plain stops are transcribed as voiced, e.g. д.
The Duden-Aussprachewörterbuch transcribes the aspirated consonants of Korean as [ph], [tʃh], etc. There are only a couple of examples of tense consonants appearing, namely 울산 Ulsan transcribed as [ulssan] (/s/ following /l/ becomes tense in Sino-Korean vocabulary) and 압록강 Amnokkang transcribed as [amnokkaŋ]. The gemination occurs across a morpheme boundary in the latter example. For comparison, the (needlessly complicated) system currently used by English-language Wikipedia for Korean would transcribe these names as [uls͈an] and [amnok̚k͈aŋ] respectively.
I personally would simply write [ulsan] and [amnokkaŋ] since the tense series corresponds most closely to simple voiceless obstruents in other languages; I treat the plain series as underlyingly voiced lenis. This would explain the “tensing” of plain consonants after (voiceless) obstruents as simple devoicing. 악보 akbo becoming pronounced as if it was written 악뽀 akppo can more naturally be explained as /akbo/ becoming /akpo/ through devoicing rather than /akpo/ becoming /akppo/ (in the geminate analysis) or /akp͈o/ (in the most common system where the tense consonants are treated as separate phonemes).
Thanks for that. I was wondering about Korean.