Re: Restricted clusters?

In the last episode, (On Tuesday 03 July 2007 15:53:29), Dirk Elzinga wrote:
> On 7/3/07, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...> wrote:
> >
> > 1)  Is it credible to restrict the consonants that can appear in clusters
> > to exclude the prenasalised variants?
>
> It doesn't seem likely to me, especially if the consonants really are
> prenasalized rather than a sequence of nasal and homorganic stop. (Is
> there a distinction between N+C and a prenasalized stop? That would
> also be unusual.)
Yes, there is. I'll explain below since you quoted a relevant example below.
>
> > 2) Is it credible to restrict initial syllables to those beginning with a
> > consonant, and have vowel-initial syllables internally?
>
> No. In fact, just the opposite pattern is typically found; that is,
> typically you find only consonant-initial syllables in word-medial
> position, with vowel-initial syllables allowed word-initially.
Indeed. I may have to settle for a simple preponderance of consonant-initial
words over vowel-initial. /a, ä, e, i, o, ô, u, y/ is, after all, only eight
vowels (fewer if you group, e.g. /a/ and /â/ together because of vowel
harmony)
>
> > kanta (nb cluster!)
> >
> > kanda (prenasalised "t")
>
> The distinction betwen /kanta/ and /kanda/ seems unlikely to me. How
> is this distinction realized phonetically?
Three ways. First, I should reiterate that although consonant clusters are not
allowed word-initially or finally, so that "palast" could never be a word,
nor "stapal", they are allowed medially, so "pastal", "taspal" etc are valid
words (but not "lastap" or "stalap", since "-p" isn't allowed word-finally
either.)

HOWEVER,

We do find:

palant / ntava

and even

ntwandwa / myalant'

(where ' marks a final, palatalised consonant)

Secondly, the voiceless plosives /p, t, k, c?, q/ and their aspirated,
palatalised and labialised variants have neither allophonically nor
phonemically voiced variants, whereas the nasalised plosives do (in medial
position).

-- This is also the source of the usage of (I) "nt" &c to mark (a) a medial
cluster, (b) an initial nasalised plosive, and (c) a final nasalised plosive,
and of (II) "nd" &c to mark the corresponding nasalised plosive in medial
position.

(I could also have used "nt" to mark the cluster and just "d" to mark the
nasalised plosive - but I don't think the latter is very intuitive. Plus it
reintroduces/increases the use of plain "b", "d", "g", which make the
language look more like Estonian than Finnish.)

Thirdly (and lastly), the clusters are subject to consonant gradation, whereas
the nasalised variants are not. For example, the genitive of "ranta" "speech"
is "rannan", whereas the genitive of "Nanda" "Nanda (woman's name)
is "Nandan". Similarly "mamma" "mother" is "maman" in the genitive,
and "mamba" (criminal) is "mamban" in the gen.

This is probably because the prenasalised consonants seem only to occur in the
onset of a syllable (or the coda of a final syllable).

>
> > 3) Anyone know of a conlang that has two (or more) tones and has to use
> > different diacritics to represent them over different letters (e.g. high
> > and low tone over front and back vowels?)
>
> I have no idea. But this seems to be an orthographic rather than a
> phonological decision.
Yeah. I just put it there to avoid starting another thread.
>
> Bear in mind that this is *your* language, and you should do what
> feels right to you in constructing it. This may include flouting
> proposed universals of human language.
>
> Dirk
That's true. Thanks for that.

Jeff
--
"Please understand that there are small
European principalities devoted to debating
Tcl vs. Perl as a tourist attraction."

                            -- Cameron Laird

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