Re: NATLANG: o 0? re: consonant clusters
| From: | Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, December 10, 2002, 4:36 |
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Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> Yes indeed. Which shows how strange English is, which keeps untouched clusters
> like /sk-/ and /st-/, but simplified clusters like /kn-/, /ks-/ or /gz-/, and
> still does synchronically :)) .
:-) It is odd. But, I suspect that at least part of the reason is that
/sk/ /st/ /sp/ is more common than /kn/, etc. was. If we dropped the
/s/, there'd be *lots* of ambiguity, whereas simplifying, e.g., /kn/ to
/n/ only created a few homophones (night/knight, know/no, knot/not,
knead/need being the only ones I can think of, and the last of those is
only homophonous because the GVS also messed with the pronunciation).
Of course, we could also have gone the Romance route of adding a sound,
/st/ -> /@st/ or /s@t/ perhaps.
--
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