Germinate - geminate

Do not confuse the verbs ‘to germinate‘ and ‘to geminate‘ or the corresponding nouns ‘germination‘ and ‘gemination‘.

The verb ‘to germinate‘ is used intransitively of seeds or spores, and means ‘to begin to grow (i.e., to put out shoots or develop new tissue)‘. Used transitively, it means ‘to cause (seeds or spores) to grow‘. The word is also used metaphorically of, e.g., ideas or plans, as in ‘The idea of writing a history of the city germinated in the course of the year, while he worked on other projects‘.

The verb ‘to geminate‘, which may be used transitively or intransitively, means ‘to double, to arrange (or be arranged) in pairs‘. As well as the noun gemination, there is also an adjective, geminate, meaning ‘doubled, arranged in pairs‘. All three of these words are used in the life sciences – a geminate leaf, e.g., is a compound leaf consisting of two leaflets – and in the study of language.

In linguistic contexts ‘to geminate‘ and the related noun and adjective have three different uses. They may refer to:

• the doubling of a letter in a word. In English, for example, the final consonant in many monosyllabic verbs, such as ‘to chat‘, ‘to sin‘, ‘to pot‘, ‘to sip‘ is doubled in the past tense to produce ‘chatted‘, ‘sinned‘, ‘potted‘, ‘sipped‘: and so we may say that, e.g., the ‘t‘ in ‘chatted‘ is geminate or geminated. In Arabic ‘the base form of the ... verb ... can be extended by gemination of consonants ...‘ (Eckehard Schulz, Günther Krahl, and Wolfgang Reuschel, Standard Arabic, p. 178): e.g. with the verb fariha, meaning ‘to be glad or happy‘, gemination of its second root consonant (r) produces farraha, meaning ‘to gladden, to make happy‘. (Arabic verbs formed in this way, i.e., by gemination of their second root consonant, regularly have causative or factitive force.)

For English, AWE has an article on Consonant doubling, and a category of articles which reflect doubling of consonants.

• the doubling or lengthening of a consonantal sound – such as the doubled ‘n‘ sound in the pronunciation of ‘thinness‘ or the doubled ‘l‘ sound in ‘soulless‘ or the doubled ‘t‘ sound in the Italian rottame or sotto. (Note that in English, unlike, e.g., Italian, doubled consonants are not usually pronounced as two sounds: e.g., the geminate ‘t‘ in ‘chatted‘ (above) is not pronounced differently from a single ‘t‘.)

• the immediate doubling or repetition of a word, phrase, or clause – for example, ‘It’s unbelievable, ... unbelievable‘ or ‘What he’s done is quite appalling, .... quite appalling‘. Gemination of this kind may be used for rhetorical effect, e.g., to emphasise what is said, (Compare anaphora.)

Etymological note: Both ‘germinate‘ and ‘geminate‘ have Latin roots. ‘Germinate‘ comes from the Latin verb germinare, ‘to sprout‘, and ‘geminate‘ from the verb geminare, ‘to double, repeat‘ (from the adjective geminus, ‘born at the same time, twin‘, which also gives us, in its plural form the name of the star-sign (sign of the Zodiac) Gemini (the Twins)).