Initial /sp/ vs. /ps/ (Was: Comparison of philosophical languages)

In a message dated 1/22/2003 11:56:46 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
yonjuuni@EARTHLINK.NET writes:


> James Landau wrote:
> > You remind me of my little brother! Except he always did it at the
> > beginning of words. When Alex was three or four, he used to say
> > "psot" instead of "spot" or "psace" for "space".
> 
> Well, stop-fricative sequences are more natural at the beginning of a
> syllable than fricative-stop sequences.  PIE just happened to be an
> oddball that allowed s+stop sequences in initial positions (and a number
> of IE langs have lost those /sk/ /sp/ /st/ clusters, often thru
> epenthesis)
 ¿Como el estado actual en español, especialmente?

 I guess you're thinking of affricates when you say that. Now that I think of 
it, affricates (which IIRC some people were calling the Greek "ks"/"x" (xi) 
and "ps" as well) fit that pattern, while the fricative-before-stop beginning 
is confined to the /sk/, /sp/, /st/ group in longtime-English words (although 
Yiddish and Italian give us more recent examples with "spiel", "schtick", 
"sgraffito" and other /S/ and /z/ words).

 As for my brother's "pseech" impediment, my mother went to see a 
"psecialist" about this and she said that this was actually a pretty common 
reversal in children. (She was also worried about his playing around with 
syllable reversal earlier in his development, he'd say "ma-mee, ma-mee" and t
hen play around with "mee-ma, mee-ma", which the specialist also said was 
common.) It sounds like this must be a universal among children who are 
learning to speak, facing learned languages and starting out with more 
"natural" combinations. In case you're wondering, Alex outgrew this a long 
time ago.

 ObConlang: The Kankonian dictionary lists words beginning with dz, dzh, ks, 
ps, psh, tsh, tz (treated as a single phoneme and letter of the alphabet in 
Kankonian), sk, sp, st, shp, shph (where "ph" is a repeated "p" turned into a 
raspberry sound), sht and zg (well, ONE zg word). Among the words beginning 
with ps- are:

psetan:  leak, to leak
psetzibi:  wasp
psimaki:  substance

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