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, Berber, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Classical Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, and Tamil. Most languages (including English) do not have distinctive long consonants. Vowel length is distinctive in more languages than consonant length, although several languages feature both independently (as in Arabic, Japanese, Finnish, and Estonian), or have interdependent vowel and consonant length (as in Norwegian and Swedish).

Phonetics

Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants, and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, delaying release. That is, the "hold" is lengthened. Long consonants are usually around one and a half or two times as long as short consonants, depending on the language.

Tooth gemination

Tooth gemination is a dental phenomenon that appears to be two teeth developed from one. There is one main crown with a cleft in it that, within the cervical third of the crown, looks like two teeth, though it is not two teeth. The number of the teeth in the arch will be normal.

Description

The phenomenon of gemination arises when two teeth develop from one tooth bud and, as a result, the patient has an extra tooth, in contrast to fusion, where the patient would appear to be missing one tooth. Fused teeth arise through union of two normally separated tooth germs, and depending upon the stage of development of the teeth at the time of union, it may be either complete or incomplete. On some occasions, two independent pulp chambers and root canals can be seen. However, fusion can also be the union of a normal tooth bud to a supernumerary tooth germ. In these cases, the number of teeth is also normal and differentiation from gemination may be very difficult, if not impossible. In geminated teeth, division is usually incomplete and results in a large tooth crown that has a single root and a single canal. Both gemination and fusion are prevalent in primary dentition, with incisors being more affected.