Long vowels also arise when ð is omitted between identical vowels.
The mothers did not produce identical super vowels, but they exaggerated the three vowels by the same degree.
The term omataina or 'vocalic extension' is used of the addition to the 'base' of a final vowel identical to the sundoma (p. 319).
All long vowels are written as clusters of identical short vowels.
Whenever two identical short vowels would occur side by side in a single morpheme, one of them has to be marked for high tone.
When adding an affix would result in two identical vowels side by side, an epenthetic /h/ is inserted to prevent the forbidden sequence.
Phonetically long vowels, then, are treated as a sequence of two identical vowels.
For these words, an underlying sequence of identical vowels is proposed.
In some languages, vowel length is sometimes better analyzed as a sequence of two identical vowels.
This is true because, in many dialects, the words in all or most of the sets are pronounced with similar or identical stressed vowels.