occur word-initially, as well as word-medially. For example, 'cat', 'grandfather' and 'madam' all begin with geminate consonants. There are three consonants that cannot be geminated: , and . Whenever morphological rules would geminate these consonants, and are prefixed with , and changes to . For example: 'army' (root) > 'an army' (noun) 'stone' (root) > 'a stone' (noun); is usually spelt 'nation' (root) > 'a nation' (noun) 'medicine' (root) > 'medicine' (noun) Japanese In Japanese, consonant length is distinctive (as is vowel length). Gemination in the syllabary is represented with the sokuon, a small : for hiragana in native words and for katakana in foreign words. For example, (, ) means 'came; arrived', while (, ) means 'cut; sliced'. With the influx of gairaigo ('foreign words') into Modern Japanese, voiced consonants have become able to geminate as well: () means '(computer) bug', and () means 'bag'. Distinction between voiceless gemination and voiced gemination is visible in pairs of words such as (, meaning 'kit') and (, meaning 'kid'). In addition, in some variants of colloquial Modern Japanese, gemination may be applied to some adjectives and adverbs (regardless of voicing) in order to add emphasis: (, 'amazing') contrasts with (, 'really amazing'); (, , 'with all one's strength') contrasts with (, , 'really with all one's strength'). Turkish In Turkish gemination is indicated by two identical letters as in most languages that have phonemic gemination. Loanwords originally ending with a phonemic geminated consonant are always written and pronounced without the ending gemination as in Arabic. (hajj) (from Arabic pronounced ) (Islamic calligraphy) (from Arabic pronounced ) Although gemination is resurrected when the word takes a suffix. becomes ('to hajj') when it takes the suffix "-a" ('to', indicating destination) becomes ('of calligraphy') when it takes the suffix "-ın" ('of', expressing possession) Gemination also occurs when a suffix starting with a consonant comes after a word that ends with the same consonant. ('hand') + ("-s", marks plural) = ('hands'). (contrasts with , 's/he eliminates') ('to throw') + ("-ed", marks past tense, first person plural) = ('we threw [smth.]'). (contrasts with , 'waste') Malayalam In Malayalam, compounding is phonologically conditioned so gemination occurs at words' internal boundaries. Consider following example: + ( + ) – () Gemination also occurs in a single morpheme like () which has a different meaning from (). Uralic languages Estonian Estonian has three phonemic lengths; however, the third length