Re: Let Me Introduce Myself

In a message dated 11/28/01 3:33:39 PM, barry_garcia@CSUMB.EDU writes:

>CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
>>Interesting. I tried to figure out if I avoided such influence... I'm
>not
>>sure. It seems that I have a predilection for "free" word order and verbal
>>aspects, but OTOH, for example, I tend to regularize the inventory of
>>permitted consonant clusters, which is indeed very un-Russian ;)
>
>The way i avoid influence of my native language is following the style
>of
>languages i know, or have had some exposure to (Saalangal is supposed to
>be very "philippine/indonesian" in character, and of course, Montreiano
>is
>a Romance language).
>
>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/.

(note: I used double quotes for his italics)

Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html