Re: Most common consonant cluster types cross-linguistically

On Sat, 2008-08-16 at 08:47 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:

> Is there any comparative data available on what are the most
> common kinds of consonant cluster across different languages?
> E.g., my impression is that nasal + nasal and plosive + plosive
> onset clusters as in Greek (mnemo, ptera, etc) are rarer than
> clusters that mix different manners of articulation, like fricative + plosive
> or plosive + fricative; but how much has this been quantified?
The answers to this so far seem to be muddling several different
phenomena. You are obviously interested in clusters within a syllable,
while some people are talking about groups at syllable boundaries. As
for affricates like /ts/, these are not clusters (which is one of the
reasons why I prefer the Americanist notation to IPA: /c/).

I don't know of any statistical studies, but my own observations suggest

1. The commonest initial clusters are stop+semivowel, followed by stop
+liquid.

2. The commonest final clusters are nasal+stop, followed by liquid+stop.

Many languages have extrasyllabic consonants: initial and final clusters
that can only occur word- initially or finally. English can have a word
ending in /ŋθs/, but not an internal syllable; Dutch can have a word
beginning in /str/ but not an internal syllable. The unnerving initial
clusters in Polish and Georgian mostly include extrasyllabics, and are
word-initial only.