Basic Guidelines For English Spellings
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adjective
PhoneticsConsisting of identical adjacent speech sounds; doubled.
‘consonants motivating a short vowel were all originally geminate’- ‘Some geminates, however, are clearly more morphologically distinct than others are.’
verb
[with object]PhoneticsDouble or repeat (a speech sound)
‘a medial liquid is geminated over two syllables’- ‘Because gemination is common in Dravidian languages, double consonants in written English are often geminated: ‘sum-mer’ for summer and ‘sil-lee’ for silly.’
- ‘Like English geminates and schwas, Hebrew matres lectionis have a more ambiguous relation to speech than graphemes that code consonants, for example, and are thus coded less effectively.’
- ‘For many words, however, the most common misspelling seems to be to violate conservation of geminates, and write the word with no doubled consonants at all.’
Origin
Late Middle English from Latin geminatus, past participle of geminare ‘double, pair with’, from geminus ‘twin’.
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