Re: Restricted clusters?

In the last episode, (On Wednesday 04 July 2007 09:19:10), John Vertical
wrote:
> Damn, I just wrote a long reply to this, but Listserv decided that I'm not
> allowed to write for that long and asked me to re-login, deleting the draft
> in the process. Grumble... Okay, synopsis:
>
> 1) Since you have prenasalized versions of pretty much everything, I think
> analyzing these as clusters all the way would make better sense than
> analyzing some as clusters and some as phonemes.
> 1.1) You seemed to lack prenasalized aspirates, so consider: n+th = [nt],
> n+t = [nd].
> 1.2) Gradation-wise, how would ranta<>randan, randa<>rannan sound like?
> Would make more sense than ranta<>rannan, randa<>randan IMO.
I like that; it might also make it interestingly different from Finnish.
(That's my goal for this project...to make it sound like Finnish, but
somehow...Not. I could do that vocabularily, but it would also be nice to be
able to do it phon{etic,ologic,otactic}ally.)

If I do so, is it credible to have a rule that excludes consonant clusters "in
the Finnish places", except when they begin with a nasal
(i.e. "tipit", "tipsit", "ntipit", "tipint" but not "titipt", "ptintit")?

>
> 2) Completely lacking palatalized/labialized aspirates in a system this big
> is odd.
I think that's one I'll leave!
>
> 3) Contrasting /c c_j/ is extremely bizarre. /c cj/ could do tho, or
> palatalization affecting the vowels substantially (a la /ca/ = [ca], /c_ja/
> = [cE]) but you seem to have too many of 'em for that to work.
Hmm, looking back I don't see that...if it's there, that's a mistake on my
part.

>
> 4) Contrasting /s S s_j S_j/ is also odd. /s S_j/ and /s s` s_j/ ~ /s S
> S_j/ are more typical systems.
I might modify that to /s s_j S ~ S_j/ .
>
> 5) Having [nD_j] but no [D_j] is a bit odd too, but less odd than the
> others.
Not sure what to do about that...If I get rid of the prenasalised stops (which
I probably will do if a restriction on endpoint clusters to nasal+stop is
credible) it won't much matter anyway :-/.
>
> 6) I look forwards to more of this project!
Thanks!
>
> John Vertical
Jeff
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