aspirated counterpart. In vocalised Urdu, the shadda is placed on the unaspirated consonant followed by the short vowel diacritic, followed by the do-cashmī hē, which aspirates the preceding consonant. There are few examples where an aspirated consonant is truly doubled. Italian Italian is notable among the Romance languages for its extensive geminated consonants. In Standard Italian, word-internal geminates are usually written with two consonants, and geminates are distinctive. For example, , meaning 'he/she drank', is phonemically and pronounced , while ('he/she drinks/is drinking') is , pronounced . Tonic syllables are bimoraic and are therefore composed of either a long vowel in an open syllable (as in ) or a short vowel in a closed syllable (as in ). In varieties with post-vocalic weakening of some consonants (e.g. → 'reason'), geminates are not affected ( → 'May'). Double or long consonants occur not only within words but also at word boundaries, and they are then pronounced but not necessarily written: + = ('who knows') and ('I am going home') . All consonants except can be geminated. This word-initial gemination is triggered either lexically by the item preceding the lengthening consonant (e.g. by preposition 'to, at' in [a kˈkaːsa] 'homeward' but not by definite article in [la ˈkaːsa] 'the house'), or by any word-final stressed vowel ([] 's/he spoke French' but [] 'I speak French'). Latin In Latin, consonant length was distinctive, as in 'old woman' vs. 'year'. Vowel length was also distinctive in Latin until about the fourth century, and was reflected in the orthography with an apex. Geminates inherited from Latin still exist in Italian, in which and contrast with regard to and as in Latin. It has been almost completely lost in French and completely in Romanian. In West Iberian languages, former Latin geminate consonants often evolved to new phonemes, including some instances of nasal vowels in Portuguese and Old Galician as well as most cases of and in Spanish, but phonetic length of both consonants and vowels is no longer distinctive. Nepali In Nepali, all consonants have geminate counterparts except for . Geminates occur only medially. Examples: – 'equal' ; – 'honour' – 'disturb!' ; – 'authority' – 'cook!' ; – 'certain' Norwegian In Norwegian, gemination is indicated in writing by double consonants. Gemination often differentiates between unrelated words. As in Italian, Norwegian uses short vowels before doubled consonants and long vowels before single consonants. There are qualitative