Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

Quoting JS Bangs <jaspax@...>:

> There's no reason that [ks] couldn't be monophonemic in some other
> language, but it certainly isn't in English. Monophonemic clusters at
> different places of articulation are rare, but not unheard-of, and my
> conlang Hiksilipsi uses /ks/ and /ps/ as single phonemes. In English [nd],
> [mb], [Ng] are clusters, but many African languages treat them as units.
> In general, deciding which clusters are single phonemes and which are
> units is a language-specific process.
I think we may have discussed this before, but such "harmonic
clusters" typically have to agree in some laryngeal feature, like
voicing, aspiration, glottalization, etc. This is certainly the
case in Georgian, where harmonic clusters must agree in voicing
and glottalization and can occur where nonharmonic clusters may
not, just like the case you discuss with [tS].

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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Chicago, IL 60637

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