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Question
I went to primary school in Rhineland-Palatinate, where all the teachers were adamant doubled letters were pronounced geminate.
They explained whether a consonant was spelt with two letters dependent on whether one articulated two distinct consonants after one another. For example they insisited (paraphrased & translated) « retten has two ⟨t⟩ as it is pronounced with two /t/ "ret-ten" ». I guess in their mind retten is /rɛttɛn/.
On a side note, it won't let me post without a link for something, so there, have a cute snail.
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Nobody in school ever taught me double letters are geminates. I also don't know any German dialect where they are actually geminates. The first time I encountered geminates was when learning Japanese.
At some stage I learned that German double letters actually influence the vowel quality of the preceding vowel, but I don't remember if I was taught this in school or not.
Polish has them as well
It (i.e. lengthening of consonants) happens in Swiss German, where consonant length is phonemic in several cases.
Examples from my dialect:
/hasə/ (Hase) vs. /hasːe/ (hassen)
/ɔfə/ (Ofen) vs. /ɔfːə/ (offen)
/ɪnə/ (ihnen) vs. /ɪnːə/ (innen)
As far as I know, this was generally the case in older High German, but more northern dialects shifted away from it while it stayed in Swiss German (don't know exactly when this change happened, though).
Present-day Standard German doesn't have actual geminates (which is a technical term for "long consonants"). The length of a consonant sound does not carry any meaning, and is not encoded in writing in any way.
Medieval German had them, and some present-day dialects also do. But in today's Standard German, double consonant letters are merely instances of Silbengelenkschreibung: consonants that are part of two syllables* are doubled up — except when they are already di- or trigraphs ("ch", "sch", and possibly affricates), and instead of double "k" and double "z", "ck" and "tz" are used, respectively.
Many of these instances derive from former geminates, but unless you are deliberately pronouncing the individual syllables separately (back in primary school, we used to clap with each syllable, in order to figure out where the word can be split with a hyphen if the line gets too long), you can't hear anything special in the consonant sound itself. The only difference you might hear between a double and a single consonant is the length of the preceding vowel.
*Basically, syllables can't end with a short vowel, and a single consonant between vowels always belongs to the second syllable. So if a short vowel is followed by a single consonant and another vowel, the consonant by these rules belongs to both syllables, and the Silbengelenkschreibung marks that fact in the written representation.
Actually, there are some cases where the length of the vowel does make a difference. I once read a post about a Chinese (?) guy wanting to order Nuten, which apparently are some kind of tools or sth Idk. He ordered Nutten instead.^ ^
Yes, of couse, vowel length carries meaning. Very much so. I never said it doesn't.
But consonant length isn't really a thing in (modern Standard) German.
Standard German actually does have geminates, but not in words like "retten" (where only certain accents/dialects such as Swiss ones use geminates).
German has geminates in compounds such as "Bluttat". If you pronounce "Blut" and "Tat" separately, both words have a t that actually gets released in an aspirated way. But when you combine them, you just release a single t. However, it's not just "Blutat" because the t is held for longer, it's geminated.
I also feel like n shows up in geminate form sometimes when -en is reduced to syllabic n? Like, if I say, idk, kennen versus kenn they're really only distinguished by how long I hold the n.
And funnily enough, given how similar short "i" and "e"-schwa sound, words like "Kolleginnen" and "Kollegen" also almost only differ in the length of "n". Or in other words, a slightly reduced "Kolleginnen" where the "e"-schwa of "-en" is removed sounds a lot like a carefully pronounced "Kollegen".
If I hear things like "liebe Kolleginnen and Kollegen", it often sounds to me like "liebe Kollegen und Kollegn" (leading to the reaction in my head "Wait, did they just say 'Kollegen' twice?"), almost defeating the whole purpose of calling out the female form, too.
Back to "kennen" vs. "kenn", I'd say that while the length of "n" can possibly disambiguate, it also isn't really fully systematic. Both are possible: You can say "kenn" with a lengthened "n" emphasis (like "Ich KENNNN dich doch irgendwoher!?") without making it harder to understand, and on the other hand "kennen" can also be fully reduced to "kenn'n" said with an overall short "n" without making it any harder to understand, either. (I can say "Ich kenn dich nicht" and "Wir kennen dich nicht" with an identical-sounding "kenn" in both cases.)
Or "Blum" instead of "Blumen"
Bluttat is still different from Japanese katto though. It’s not really a long “t”, it’s as you said pronounced like two separate words “Blut Tat” whereas katto isn’t pronounced kat to.
This sounds like some kind of local dialect thing. Nobody ever taught me that words like retten had geminate consonants and I've never heard anyone pronounce it that way. I was always told doubled consonants in writing meant the preceding vowel was short.
I doubt it's a dialectal thing—coïncidentally so at best. My primary school teachers struck me as the kind to declare nonstandard German "wrong". And regardless, they were definitely trying to teach Standard German.
Yes,i learned „Silbenschwingen“ and „Silbenkönig“ and some rules like „Verlängerungsmethode“ oder „Ableiten“ to find out double consonants, e.g. Ha-se, Damm - Däm-me. But I didn’t learn some specific rules. I never learned „Write ‚k‘ after „l,m,n,r“ and never write „ck“.“
You mean something like Rate - Ratte, where the a is a long vocal in Rate and a short vocal in Ratte?
We were taught this in Berlin in my Grundschule with a quite easy Three-Finger-System, together with the usage of the ß.
I know that that's the real orthographic reason, but I'm confident my primary school teachers were set on the consonant sound being geminate being the actual reason.
With the whole class, we'd repeat various words with intersyllabic /C/ orthographically represented as ⟨CC⟩. We were asked to articulate "both" /C/ clearly to grow accustomed to the supposed orthoëpic difference so that we'd spell words correctly. We did something along the lines of « ret-ten... nen-nen... Ras-sel... ».
Well, yes. We also learned this stupid Singsang about "Trenne nicht st, denn es tut ihm weh." to learn where to seperate these doubled consonants and when. But we also learned, why we use doubled (or long) consonants in the first place.
Excellent snail video
In Münsterländer Platt there are some. But not in high German.
Pretty epic
Here for the snails, very cute
🗣🔥