Re: Hiksilipsi complex segments (was: RE: [CONLANG] me again

And Rosta sikyal:

I'll respond to And here, since he had basically the same argument as
John, but was nice enough to change the subject line :-).

> > The analysis of these as single phonemes is motivated by the fact that
> > Hiksilipsi allows no word-final consonants, which implies no consonants in
> > coda positions--yet words such as /apsu/ are perfectly fine.  The
> > syllabification must therefore be /a.psu/.  Looking at other words reveals
> > that the set of allowable onset clusters is quite limited--in fact,
> > restricted to just four phonetic clusters: [ps ks mp Nk].  The best
> > analysis, then, and the one I support, is to regard these as unit
> > phonemes, and to say that Hiksilipsi has a strict prohibition against
> > onset clusters and coda consonants.
>
> The second argument is clear, but I don't understand the first.
> There are well-known languages (e.g. Italian) that have no final
> consonants but that do have coda consonants. (And there are languages,
> e.g. Wolof, iirc, that have word-final consonants but no coda
> consonants.)
How, then, do we ever arrive at the conclusion that there are no coda
consonants for a language that might allow onset clusters?  I suppose that
the Maximal Onset Principle will help here--if the only CC's are CC's that
also occur initially, then no syllabification will ever include a coda
consonant.

And this is the situation in Hiksilipsi.  The only consonant clusters
(other than those involving the glides [j] and [w], which are
exceptional), are [ps ks mp Nk], which can occur initially and medially.
The most natural analysis, IMHO, is to say that these represent onset
clusters in each case and, given the peculiar distribution of these
sounds, to say that they're unit phonemes.

BTW, I decided today to write Hiksilipsi with a syllabary :-), and drew up
some preliminary glyphs.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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