1063: Long Consonants (and Vowels) Nov 6, 2017

English speakers may be fairly familiar with the idea of long vowels, as in the difference between the [a] in 'car' 'father', but these vowels depend largely on the sounds they precede, and whether or not that the consonant is voiced; it would not sound normal to use short or long vowels in alternated places, but it would probably would be understandable to switch the two, and the issue usually concerns whether the vowel is lax or tense instead. In some languages however, the length of vowels affect the meaning of words a great deal more. Anyone who has seen Finnish writing would know that it has a lot more vowels than English writing—it is possibly the only European language to normally have more vowels than consonants in a given text—but partly this is due to the fact that a repeated vowel signifies long vowels. Furthermore, in Finnish as well as many other languages, consonants can be long as well, so for example 'kuka' means 'who', but the word 'kukka' means 'flower'.