# gemination (in Romance languages)



## brian

Hi all,

First off, is it known for a fact (other than a Wikipedian fact) that _gemination_ existed in Latin? I suppose it makes sense that it did, considering Italian (still) has it, and it seems more natural that langauges would lose, rather than gain, the phenomenon of gemination.

That being said, I wonder if there are any theories as to how or why gemination loss occurs. Why would Spanish and French lose it, yet Italian and Catalan would retain it?

I look forward to your answers.


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## Hulalessar

Latin was more or less written phonetically so it is reasonable to suppose that if a double consonant was written there was a reason for it.

There is in fact a lot more gemination in Italian than there was in Latin and in positions where Latin did not have it. This suggests that languages do gain gemination, though I am unable to offer any examples outside the Romance languages.


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## berndf

I once read that before double consonants where used in Latin some writers used diacritical marks to mark long consonants. The fact that neither gemination nor diacritical marks became commonly accepted to denote long vowels might even indicate that long consonant length might have been even more important than vowel length.


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## brian

You're right about Italian having more gemination, or at least having gemination where Latin did not. Examples come to mind of Italian words created as the composition of multiple words, for example _a*dd*io _(cf. Fr. _adieu_, no gemination), _a*rr*ivederci_ (cf. Fr._ au revoir_, no gemination), _e*vv*iva!_, _se*bb*ene_, _a*pp*unto_, and many many others.

In fact, even words or phrases that in standard Italian do not technically contain gemination _do_ contain it when written or spoken in dialect. In other words, dialectal or colloquial Italian "bridges" words and makes the language "flow" more (just how you would think of Italian) by creating gemination across words. For example, _'na *bb*ella *(c)c*osa = una bella cosa_ ("a beautiful thing").

There are also examples of word-bridging that, unlike the examples above, have not yet (as far as I know) been accepted as "standard" Italian: _ma*cc*hé (ma + che), se*nn*ò (se + no), _etc.

Interesting stuff. But I still wonder why Spanish and French lost it.


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## berndf

brian8733 said:


> But I still wonder why Spanish and French lost it.


Probably not immediately but only after gaining. French, e.g., also has double consonants which do not come from Latin, e.g. _homme_.


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## brian

Don't you think _ho*mm*e_ came from the Latin accusative _ho*m*i*n*em_ and not the nominative _ho*m*o_? It would also explain _fe*mm*e_ from _fe*m*i*n*am_, whose nominative is not *_fe*m*a_, but _fe*m*i*n*a_.


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## berndf

An assimilation of "m" and "n" when the "i" was lost? Possible. ... Like the double "r" in _a*rr*ivederci_ when the "d" of "ad" was lost.


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## brian

Edit: berndf, you changed your post ... so I think my post below makes a little less sense, but I'll keep it anyway:

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Hmm... good point. It may be a remnant of what was once gemination in French.

That is, I would think that French orthography requires an _e_ in _homme_ to signify that the _m_ is fully pronounced and not nasalized.

In other words, perhaps the full pronunciation of _m_ in _homme_ as /m/ (and not with a nasalized vowel like the _m_ in _importance_) is a remnant of what once was gemination in French but is now lost. Lost in the sense that we have /m/ instead of /mː/, and remnant in the sense that we have /m/ instead of simply a nasalized vowel like /̃ε/. Then again, can we know the French _ever_ had /mː/ here??

As for why we should see many more nouns ending in _-me_ in French, I'm not so sure. French etymology is a tricky thing. For example, you would think "river," from Latin _flumen, fluminis_, would be _flumme_ or something--but it's _fleuve_, from _fluvius_. So French oftentimes got its words in indirect ways.

But I agree that you do have a strong point, and I'm only playing the devil's advocate. 

-----

Now, as a response to your new post:



			
				berndf said:
			
		

> An assimilation of "m" and "n" when the "e" was lost? Possible. ... Like the double "r" in _a*rr*ivederci_ when the "d" of "ad" was lost.



Exactly. (although I suspect _arrivederci_ came from the assimilation of "l" (_al_) and "r" since I think the word came into being after _ad_ had already become _a_ (or _al_ in the case of _a + il_) in Italian.)


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## Joannes

brian8733 said:


> Why would Spanish and French lose it, yet Italian and Catalan would retain it?


Actually Catalan doesn't really have (phonemic) gemination either. Only in some dialects <l·l> and <l> are separate phonemes. And other instances of gemination that occur do not seem to be phonemic..


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## brian

Thanks, Joannes. I don't know much about Catalan; in this case I was trusting the Wiki article.


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## Outsider

berndf said:


> I once read that before double consonants where used in Latin some writers used diacritical marks to mark long consonants.


Yes, the _sicilicus_.



berndf said:


> The fact that neither gemination nor diacritical marks became commonly accepted to denote long vowels might even indicate that long consonant length might have been even more important than vowel length.


The fact that in classical Latin double consonants were explicitly distinguished from single consonants, whereas double vowels were not explicitly distinguished from single vowels might mean something. Except that it seems to be arguable whether long vowels were not, indeed, regularly distinguished from short vowels, too.

The loss of consonant length was one of the changes which basically turned Latin into the Romance languages. The typical transformation was a kind of "softnening": long consonants became single, while single consonants were voiced:

cc, pp, tt > c, p, t
c, p, t > g, b, d​There were, however, many exceptions and special cases. (Standard) Italian here seems to have been the exception, rather than the rule.


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## berndf

I found this which suggest the OF oblique form (OF retained the nominative-accusative distinction much later than other Romance languages) was _home_ with one _m_.

Another example: How do you explain the double-n in _dictionnaire_?


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## brian

I don't know. Again, it might simply be an orthographic way of representing the full /n/ as opposed to a nasalized vowel like /̃ε/.

But I've lost track of the point you/we are trying to make.  I don't doubt that French once had gemination--although I don't yet see/have proof that it did.

It seems most (all?) _n_'s like in _dictionnaire_ were doubled, e.g. _pardo*n*_ (with /̃ɔ/) --> _pardo*nn*er_ (with /n/).

_Dictionnaire_ works similarly, coming ultimately from _dictio*n* _(with /̃ɔ/) + Lat. _-arium_ --> _dictio*nn*aire_ (with /n/).

I guess my point is that the double _n_'s do illustrate a difference in pronunciation, but not necessarily gemination.


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## Outsider

berndf said:


> I found this which suggest the OF oblique form (OF retained the nominative-accusative distinction much later than other Romance languages) was _home_ with one _m_.
> 
> Another example: How do you explain the double-n in _dictionnaire_?


Perhaps it's meant to be etymological.



brian8733 said:


> It seems most (all?) _n_'s like in _dictionnaire_ were doubled, e.g. _pardo*n*_ (with /ŋ/) --> _pardo*nn*er_ (with /n/).
> 
> _Dictionnaire_ works similarly, coming ultimately from _dictio*n* _(with /ŋ/) + Lat. _-arium_ --> _dictio*nn*aire_ (with /n/).


Is that supposed to be the modern pronunciation?


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## brian

Outsider said:


> Is that supposed to be the modern pronunciation?



Yes, and like I said, the modern pronunciation may indeed reflect the old gemination. In other words, the modern use of /n/ instead of a nasalized vowel like /̃ɔ/ or /̃ε/ might reflect the older use of /nː/ over /n/. I don't know...


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## berndf

brian8733 said:


> It seems most (all?) _n_'s like in _dictionnaire_ were doubled, e.g. _pardo*n*_ (with /ŋ/).


I am not quite sure what you mean. There is no /ŋ/ in _pardon_ (at least not in Standard French). Or do you mean /ɔ̃/?


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## brian

Oh sorry, wrong IPA letter. My IPA knowledge is very limited.  But yes, that's what I meant. In other words, it's the same difference as you see between _bo*n*_ and _bo*nn*e_, and even there the _n_ is doubled to show the difference in pronunciation, though it does not imply gemination (or at least not in modern French).

Edit: Okay, I don't want this to turn into an IPA lesson/discussion. I realize now that the nasal sound in French is transcribed with the ~ over the nasalized vowel, so _importance_ has no /ŋ/, but rather a /ε̃/ a /α̃/ for the _m_ and _n_, respectively. Please disregard all my IPA mistakes.


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## berndf

No problem, I just wanted to be sure I understood you correctly.

If it were that simple I'd be glad. But there are many examples where _n_ and _m_ are not doubled: _le voisin, la voisine, le voisinage_. You don't need a double consonant to un-nasalize the preceeding vowel. A vowel after _n_ or _m_ is sufficient.

I can't see any logic in French's use of double consonants. This can have three reasons:
1) I am too stupid and/or ignorant to see the logic.
2) French had a period where consonant lengths mattered. And _dictionnaire_ really once had a long _n_.
3) Because double consonants don't matter, modern spelling is randomn.


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## Joannes

You will find many cases in which double consonants in French have the same effect on pronunciation as in German (or the Germanic languages in general): they change the vowel quality (nasality not really).


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## Flaminius

Is it possible that gemination and vowel length are two aspects of the same phonological rule; moraic distinction (long and short syllables)?  For the modern languages discussed here, moras do not really make minimal pairs, so this may be a dying species.  Still, Italian elongates accented syllables (or places accents on syllables in order to keep them long?), so much so that uttering Italian syllables with even timing sounds very weird.  Could anyone check if the same things apply to Catalan?


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## berndf

Joannes said:


> You will find many cases in which double consonants in French have the same effect on pronunciation as in German (or the Germanic languages in general): they change the vowel quality (nasality not really).


I thought of that. If this is true than [e] and [o] should never occur in before double consonants. I can't think of enough examples to decide this now. On the other hand, French has other ways to mark [e] and [o] as distinct from [ɛ] and [ɔ] namely "é" and "ô".


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## Joannes

Bwa, never... French spelling is better than English spelling but it still pretty much sucks of course. There _are_ other ways to mark vowel quality, obviously - and I would say that exactly this bad assignment of graphemes is French orthography's main problem. So that's why I wrote 'in many cases', because I guess there could be other orthographic mechanisms at work that trouble the one we're discussing. And yes, doubled consonants themselves indicate other things too: as we said, double <n> often unnasalizes; and double <s> is pronounced as /s/ while many single <s>s are pronounced as /z/ (some examples: *phase* - *fasse*, *baiser* - *baisser*).


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## berndf

Joannes said:


> as we said, double <n> often unnasalizes


This doesn't explain the double-n in _dictionnaire_ (the following vowel would have already done this). Until about 200 years ago _dictionnaire _and _dictionaire_ were both used. I guess it might have been the authority of the _Académie_ which eventually tipped the balance. I am leaning more and more towards the 3rd of my three choices.


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## CapnPrep

There are geminates in French, in words where schwa is deleted between identical consonants: _honnê*tet*é_, _unani*mem*ent_, _serru*rer*ie_, … Also optionally in words like_ i*mm*ense_, _a*ll*égresse_, _i*nn*ombrable_, … And in the future and conditional forms of the verbs _mourir_ and _courir_ (in order to distinguish, for example, _courais_ and _cou*rr*ais_).

In early modern French, a distinction was made in _La gue*rr*e ne dura guere_ (Chifflet).

Doubled nasal consonants are usually not etymological, and they _should_ indicate a formerly nasal vowel (later denasalized), but as you have noticed there are lots of exceptions in both directions. In inflectional/derivational series, it is often the case that "nn" and "mm" occur after the stressed vowel, and single consonants appear in other positions: _vi*e*nnent_ vs _ven*e*z_, _h*o*mme_ vs _homic*i*de_, _cons*o*nne_ vs _consonant*i*que_. But this does not explain _dictionnaire_, which must be analogical. None of these are phonetic geminates.


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## berndf

Isn't the double "r" in _je/tu courrais_ also due to vowel deletion? It is derived from Latin _curr*e*re habebam/habebas _while _je/tu courais_ is derived from _currebam/currebas_.


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## robbie_SWE

Gemination (with consonants) disappeared in Romanian too. 

Even the oldest Latin words lack gemination. 

 robbie


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## Joannes

berndf said:


> This doesn't explain the double-n in _dictionnaire_ (the following vowel would have already done this).


French spelling will always provide a counterexample for any systematicity you would want to demonstrate, so let's not get to fixed on that. Btw, *dictionnaire* does have a short vowel: so it could be the other mechanism at work, that's what I'm trying to say: French spelling is a mess, it has several graphemes for one phoneme and the other way around. But that doesn't mean there aren't any mechanisms at all..



berndf said:


> I am leaning more and more towards the 3rd of my three choices.


It's pretty obvious that it isn't the first one. I have my doubts about the second one, but it's interesting (actually, I should probably leave the thread to the discussion of that possibility, leaning closer to Brian's original question ). And there still is some systematicity, so I wouldn't say it's completely random; there are words which you would pronounce differently if they weren't written with double consonants. (And even if you would conclude to randomness, I would say you should switch the order of option 3, i.e. "Because modern spelling is random, double consonants don't matter." )


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## Yôn

Generally distinctions in a language fade away when there is no longer a need for them. Much like natural biological evolution, natural linguistic evolution seeks to preserve only that which is minimally necessary for communication.

English, for example, used to distinguish consonant and vowel length, but a series of sound changes rendered these distinctions useless, along with the absence of many *minimal pairs* dependent on length. 

That being said, one way to investigate the possible causes for gemination disappearance in certain Romance languages would be to build a list of gemination-based minimal pairs in Latin and Italian along with their Spanish/French cognates. You would want to see where the Italian words preserved/created gemination, and what, if anything, was done in the other Romance languages to preserve a distinction in these words. You might find that the other Romance languages likely found a different way to separate these words that was not dependent on gemination.

Of course, this is a massive research project, and might be better undertaken as a team .

Jon


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## CapnPrep

brian8733 said:


> You're right about Italian having more gemination, or at least having gemination where Latin did not. Examples come to mind of Italian words created as the composition of multiple words, for example _a*dd*io _(cf. Fr. _adieu_, no gemination), _a*rr*ivederci_ (cf. Fr._ au revoir_, no gemination), _e*vv*iva!_, _se*bb*ene_, _a*pp*unto_, and many many others.


Yes; this is known as _raddoppiamento sintattico_. In the vast majority of cases, the words are still separate, so the gemination is not indicated orthographically.


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## brian

Wow, great link! I didn't know it had a special name (let alone wiki). Thank you.


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## Montesacro

brian8733 said:


> In fact, even words or phrases that in standard Italian do not technically contain gemination _do_ contain it when written or spoken in dialect. In other words, dialectal or colloquial Italian "bridges" words and makes the language "flow" more (just how you would think of Italian) by creating gemination across words. For example, _'na *bb*ella *(c)c*osa = una bella cosa_ ("a beautiful thing").


 
I can’t think of any single place in Italy where an additional *c *is inserted in the phrase you mentioned.

Anyway the _raddoppiamento fonosintattico_ or word-bridging (just to use your definition of this phenomenon) is a feature of standard Italian, so it is incorrect to state that it occurs in “dialectal or colloquial language”.
Nevertheless it is rarely heard in northern Italy, while in the centre-south it is used even when it shouldn’t (for example the second *b* in the phrase _una *b*bella cosa_).




brian8733 said:


> There are also examples of word-bridging that, unlike the examples above, have not yet (as far as I know) been accepted as "standard" Italian: _ma*cc*hé (ma + che), se*nn*ò (se + no), _etc.


 
_Macché_ and _sennò_ are flawless standard Italian.




brian8733 said:


> Exactly. (although I suspect _arrivederci_ came from the assimilation of "l" (_al_) and "r" since I think the word came into being after _ad_ had already become _a_ (or _al_ in the case of _a + il_) in Italian.)


 
_Al rivederci_ doesn’t make sense in Italian.
The standard form _arrivederci_ certainly derives from _a(d) + rivederci_.




Anyway gemination occurs in English as well:
_I’ve had a ba*d* *d*ay_.
Isn’t the *d* geminated?


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## brian

Montesacro said:


> I can’t think of any single place in Italy where an additional *c *is inserted in the phrase you mentioned.



Yeah, I put the _c_ in parentheses because I was unsure if that would get doubled or not. Thanks for pointing out that it's not.



			
				Montesacro said:
			
		

> Anyway the _raddoppiamento fonosintattico_ or word-bridging (just to use your definition of this phenomenon) is a feature of standard Italian, so it is incorrect to state that it occurs in “dialectal or colloquial language”.



I heard it most when I was working on farms in Sicily, so I attributed it more to colloquial/less formal Italian or even having to do with Sicilian, but I suppose it was because I was simply living far south.




			
				Montesacro said:
			
		

> Nevertheless it is rarely heard in northern Italy, while in the centre-south it is used even when it shouldn’t (for example the second *b* in the phrase _una *b*bella cosa_).


Right.



			
				Montesacro said:
			
		

> _Macché_ and _sennò_ are flawless standard Italian.



I know that they are pronounced as such; I just didn't know if they were accepted as a _written_ standards because I've also seen _se no, senò_, etc., including on WRF.



			
				Montesacro said:
			
		

> _Al rivederci_ doesn’t make sense in Italian.
> The standard form _arrivederci_ certainly derives from _a(d) + rivederci_.



Why would the equivalent in French, _au revoir_, make sense but not _al rivedere/rivederci_, at least at some point in history (even if not anymore)? I assumed they were the same, though of course maybe not.




			
				Montesacro said:
			
		

> Anyway gemination occurs in English as well:





			
				Montesacro said:
			
		

> _
> I’ve had a ba*d* *d*ay_.
> Isn’t the *d* geminated?



That's right, but I think in English it only occurs across two words. That is, it's not phonemic in the sense that we don't have pairs of words that can only be distinguished by the length of a particular consonant, like you have in Italian: _tono_ vs. _tonno_.


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## Montesacro

_Tónno_ and _tòno_ are also distinguished by the stress-carrying vowel…
 
But of course you’re right when you say that gemination in Italian has a phonemic value while in English it hasn’t.


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## CapnPrep

brian8733 said:


> Why would the equivalent in French, _au revoir_, make sense but not _al rivedere/rivederci_, at least at some point in history (even if not anymore)?


It's not about making sense; both formations (with and without the article) make sense. In the history of French, the definite article was used much more productively with nominalized infinitives (_le revoir_). I don't know about Italian, but this particular derivation has been discussed here: Arrivederci.


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## brian

I see your point, and it's actually the same one I was trying to make. I thought Montesacro was saying that _arrivederci_ could not have come from _a*l* rivederci_ simply because that would not make sense, and my point was exactly yours: it doesn't matter if it makes sense, as long as it just happened that way! Just like it did in French.

By the way, Italian often also uses the article for nominalized infinitives, which is why it would not have surprised me if _arrivederci_ had in fact come from _al rivederci_.

Anyway, this is kind of off topic...


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## CapnPrep

brian8733 said:


> By the way, Italian often also uses the article for nominalized infinitives, which is why it would not have surprised me if _arrivederci_ had in fact come from _al rivederci_.


But would there be any reason for the _l_ to become an _r_ (thus bringing us back on topic, sort of)? Are there any cases of assimilation of the definite article in Italian?


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## Outsider

It also seems to me that the situation is not identical in the two cases. _Revoir_ here seems to be a noun (_le revoir_), whereas if I'm not mistaken _rivederci_ is definitely a verb form.


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## brian

When I first started learning Italian, I had trouble rolling my _r_'s, especially 1) at the beginning of words, and 2) when following another sound that requires the tongue to touch the palatte, like _l_. So I had particular trouble saying _Andiamo a*l r*istorante_ and could not fathom how anyone could distinguish the two sounds and still manage to get a trilled _r_.

So I asked lots of Italians for advice, and got them to pronounce it for me, and I learned that they simply say _a*rr*istorante_ (basically), especially when speaking fast. I mean there is a slight difference that I can't really explain in writing, but it's close enough to suggest (to me) that a new word could be formed in that way.


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## Outsider

Yes, that kind of assimilation happens in Spanish and some dialects of Portuguese also. The end result is similar to a geminate [r], so I dare say we're still within the topic.


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## federicoft

Montesacro said:


> I can’t think of any single place in Italy where an additional *c *is inserted in the phrase you mentioned.



Sardinia probably? 

As regards the syntactic doubling in Italian and its occurrence in other Romance languages, there's a nice article on the English-speaking Wikipedia.


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## CapnPrep

federicoft said:


> As regards the syntactic doubling in Italian and its occurrence in other Romance languages, there's a nice article on the English-speaking Wikipedia.


I guess we have to say everything twice, in honor of the topic of the thread. 

Since I'm here, maybe I'll say something about berndf's comment:


berndf said:


> Isn't the double "r" in _je/tu courrais_ also due to vowel deletion? It is derived from Latin _curr*e*re habebam/habebas _while _je/tu courais_ is derived from _currebam/currebas_.


Yes, I suppose so, but the deletion in _currere_ happened maybe 1500 years before the one in _serrurerie_, so I don't think it can explain the geminate in _cou*rr*ais_. In fact it is still possible in some varieties of French to say [seʁyʁœʁi], but I don't imagine that anyone would accept *[kuʁ*œ*ʁɛ]. (Well, who knows? I should ask around.)

And other verbs that ended up with "rr" in the future/conditional (for whatever historical reason) are no longer pronounced with a geminate today: _pou*rr*ais_ (_pouvoir_), _ve*rr*ais_ (_voir_), etc. It looks like the need to avoid ambiguity is the main factor here: there are no forms like *_pourais_ or *_verais_ in the conjugations of these verbs.


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