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What do you think about 'dd'? Sardinian and related languages got that for 'll'.
It's actually a geminate voiced retroflex stop <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_retroflex_plosive> see also, with sagittal image <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroflex_consonant>which (probably) developed by way of a retroflex lateral approximant articulation of Latin //ll//. This is a
parallel development to //ll// and //nn// becoming palatal in Spanish. Apparently there was a tendency to increase the difference between long and short sonants, only it was done in different ways in different parts. The [d`d`] pronunciation of //ll// is spread all over south Italy, including Sicily, Sardinia and southern Corsica, and apparently even Italiote Greek! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griko_language> In Bearnese intervocalic //ll// became "r" (by which probably is meant an alveolar tap), and when it ended up finally it became [t] or [t_j],[^1] so apparently the retroflex pronunciation was once current there too. In portuguese //n// and //l// simply disappeared between vowels while //nn// and //1l// became simple [n] [l]. I also read somewhere that in some middle Italian dialects //l// became [w] while //ll// became [l]. These are of course other ways of achieving the same effect of increasing the difference between 'strong' and 'weak' sonants. Note that this tendency to increase the difference between geminate and non-geminate consonants by adding a difference in quality wasn't restricted to sonants, or rather this change in sonants was triggered by what had happened spontaneously in intervocalic stops in most of Romance: (View in fixed-width font!) Latin: //b d g p t k pp tt kk n l r nn ll rr Romance: v D G b d g p t k n l 4 J\ L r or l`l` or 0 0 n l or w l Later: v D G d`d` Using CXS <http://www.theiling.de/ipa/> because Yahoo messes up Unicode. Note that voiced geminates were so rare in Latin as to be a marginal phenomenon: the only word where //dd// occurred _reddere_ didn't even survive into Romance. My own conlang Rhodrese, which is conhistorically located in eastern Gaul, has //ll// > [r`] (i.e a retroflex flap) so that it has five liquids which are distinguished by quality: //l// //lj// //ll// //r// //rr// _l_ _gl_ _ll_ _r_ _rr_ /l/ /L/ /r`/ /4/ /R/ When they end up word-final //l// > /w/ and //ll// > /l/ so BELLUS > _bel_ and VOLO > _vuao_, but BELLA > _belle_ /'bEr`I/ and VOLAT > _vuolet_. /bpj