Re: Let Me Introduce Myself

Josh Roth wrote:
(Barry Garcia wrote:)
>>Tangental thought: I wonder if there's been any information published on
>>what consonant clusters are allowed in Tagalog and which are not. I guess
>>i'll have to go through a dictionary and manually record the instances.
>>But from what i've seen almost any consonant can come together.
>
>There's a chapter in _The World's Major Languages_  on Tagalog, by Paul
>Schachter. He says:
>
>In native words tautosyllabic consonant clusters are restricted to
>syllable-intial clusters in which the second consonant is a glide: e.g.
>"diyan" /dyan/ 'there', "buwan" /bwan/ 'month'. In loanwords
syllable-initial
>clusters whose second consonant is /l/ or /r/ are also common: e.g. "plato"
>/pla:toh/ 'plate', "grado" /gra:doh/ 'grade'; and various syllable-final
>clusters are found in borrowings from English: e.g. "homework" /ho:mwo:rk/,
>"dimples" /di:mpols/, "bridge" /bri:ds/.

That's true.  But across a syllable boundary, a wide variety of clusters can
occur, unlike in many Austronesian languages.  I suspect there's no C-C of
identical stops, or of vd/vl at the same POA (with the rare exception of
onomatopoetic things like "gakgak" 'talkative'-- but originally referred to
the cries of birds).  There are probably some other restrictions, but like
Barry, I'd have to run to the dictionary to be sure. An interesting
project........