Re: Phonologies

There are also restrictions on combinations.  For example, what
combinations of sounds are legal or illegal?  In English, a word like
"strike", with three consonants in a row at the beginning, and a final
consonant, are perfectly legal, whereas in Japanese you have to add
vowels, making sutoraiku, because all consonants, with two exceptions,
must be followed by a vowel or y (the two exceptions are n and what's
often indicated abstractly as Q, which is simply a doubling of the
following consonant, e.g., the _tt_ in _yokatta_).  All languages have
some kind of restriction on syllable structure, some more strict than
others.  At the very least, this can be summed up in a formula like, for
Japanese, (C)(y)V(:,Q,N), where : indicates that the vowel is long.  In
some languages, like English, it's much more complex than that.  Some
languages also have restrictions that extend beyond the syllable, e.g.,
in my Uatakassi, /stS/ is not a legal cluster, and simplifies to /SS/.
In Finnish, a single word cannot have both front and back vowels.  Old
Japanese (but not Modern Japanese!) had a restriction that no word could
have more than one voiced consonant.

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