Double Letters in English

Many English words have doubled letters. They occur in words such as apple, letter and summer. However, English makes no distinction between long and short consonants. In Norwegian, the word sommer (summer) is pronounced with a long m. This is not the case in English, but English once maintained a distinction between long and short consonants.

In Middle English the words sune (son) and sunne (sun) were pronounced with distinctive consonant length. The former was pronounced with a short nasal and the latter with a long nasal. This distinction is no longer maintained. The words super and supper are pronounced differently, but the difference is in vowel quality, not in consonant length.

English once had distinctive consonant length, but now double consonants merely serve to indicate the quality of the preceding vowel. Other Germanic languages have also lost this distinction. They include Danish, Dutch and German.