Consonant gemination in Buginese

Abstract

The articulation of consonant gemination in Buginese is to some extent different in continuants and in stops. Since the continuants s, r, /, ra, , and ng are produced with only partial or incomplete stricture of the articulatory cavities, their articulation, including the production of sound, can be continued for some time, and in gemination is continued for approximately twice as long as in non-geminated pronunciation. The articulation of stops involves a complete stricture of the oral and nasal cavities, which is released almost immediately after its onset in non geminated pronunciation, but is held approximately twice as long in gemination of the voiceless stops p, t, c, and k. In this case no sound is produced during the continuation of the stricture. A similar articulation would be expected for gemination of the voiced stops b, d, j, and g; but this is not normally the case in Buginese. Only sporadically is a pronunciation heard in which the stricture is briefly held before its release and at the same time the voicing is briefly continued. In normal practice, however, a glottal stop is added before the voiced stop instead, as was discovered by A.A.Cense and his Buginese assistants in the thirties. In accordance with these phonetic, articulatory facts, it has become accepted usage to indicate gemination of continuants and voiceless stops in romanized transcription with duplication of the single graphemes, and to provide voiced stops with a preceding glottal stop (indicated by an apostrophe here). In the case of the continuants and the voiceless stops, however, gemi nation is only one way of describing the facts. Some authors have argued that consonants which here are called 'geminated' consonants or 'gemi nates' in fact are prolonged or long consonants, and have either written them with a prolongation mark (n:, /?:, t:, etc.), or have treated them as a separate category of consonants, to be distinguished from the short ones, and accordingly have reproduced them with special graphemes ( , , T, etc.). From a strictly phonetic point of view there is no objection to such a procedure, because the phenomenon of continuation for twice the time of pronunciation of the single phoneme can in fact be described both as gemination (twice the same) and as lengthening. A practical objection is, however, that this way the consonant system is burdened with ten more consonant phonemes, or at the least with a special mark of prolongation. It is preferable, therefore, to consider these consonants not as long ones but as geminates, and to represent them in writing with double consonant characters. In a similar way, gemination of continuants and voiceless stops on the one hand, and preglottalization of voiced stops on the other, are two