Gemination

All of these languages do have the "northwest" characteristics of lenition and loss of gemination.

But gemination does occur between words.

Consonant length (gemination) is also phonemic.

Gemination of nasals, however, is indicated by nūnu+sukun preceding the nasal to be geminated.

Gemination was not marked.

However, syllables can be analyzed as compositions of long and short phonemes, as in Finnish and Japanese, where consonant gemination and vowel length are independent.

In Aramaic and Hebrew, all non-emphatic stops occurring singly after a vowel were softened to fricatives, leading to an alternation that was often later phonemicized as a result of the loss of gemination.

In such cases, the terms fortis is sometimes used for aspiration or gemination, whereas lenis is used for single, tenuous, or voiced stops.

Orthography Traditional Tifinagh Common forms of the letters are illustrated at left, including various ligatures of t and n. Gemination, though phonemic, is not indicated in Tifinagh.

Some of these features, e.g. gemination indicating the non-past/imperfect, are generally attributed to Afroasiatic.

The second is predictive gemination of initial consonants on morpheme boundaries.

The 't' at the end of participles ending -nut, -rut, -lut, -sut (or -nyt etc.) is often dropped when no consonant follows, or replaced by gemination of the following consonant.

Where the syllable onset is a geminate consonant, e.g. in Italian, the consonant is commonly split by the stress mark, which means that the length sign is not used for gemination.