| From: | Benct Philip Jonsson <melroch@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, August 16, 2008, 15:34 |
Impressionistically medial nasal + obstruent clusters would seem to be the most common kind of cluster since if a language has consonant clusters at all these seem to be always present. Next come liquid + obstruent/nasal and/or fricative + stop/nasal and then stop/fricative + liquid and/or obstruent + semivowel. Next in order come the triconsonantal clusters that so to speak are combinations of the biconsonantal types already mentioned: nasal-stop-liquid/semivowel and fricative-stop-liquid/semivowel. In an engelang (IAL, interlingua) designed to be easy to pronounce I'd include biconsonantal clusters in an order of preference coinciding with the order of mention above, but triconsonantal clusters only sparingly if at all. Note that a semivowel-vowel or vowel-semivowel sequence may be hard to distinguish in speaking and hearing from a disyllabic vowel-vowel sequence, especially when the semivowel is preceded by a consonant. As for making an artlang realistic it is not so much the types of clusters that matters, but their frequency across the vocabulary that matters. I feel that Kidjeb has too many heavy clusters (triconsonantals and fricative-obstruent) to be really realistic, but OTOH I like the sound of them! 2008/8/16, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>:> 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? > A Google search for "most common consonant clusters" didn't > turn up anything precisely relevant. The closest fit > was this CONLANG message from 2002 by Christophe Grandsire, > > http://archives.conlang.info/vhu/wilso/phinthofian.html > > helpful, but not as quantitative as I'd like. > > -- > Jim Henry > http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html > Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before > I analyze the results and write the article >-- / BP