Re: Phonotactics of Velian I, or: Phonology of Velian II: The Wrath of John Vertical ;-)

In the last episode, (On Friday 06 July 2007 08:32:17), John Vertical wrote:
> (...)
>
> >(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")?
>
> Sure. A cluster analysis could fit better with initial preconsonantal
> nasals being phonetically syllabic however. (But phone_m_ically, ie when it
> comes to stress patterns etc, treating them as non-syllabic should be OK.)
I see; thanks.
>
> BTW, on the subject of "sounding like Finnish but somehow not" one good
> solution might be to only allow coronals or homorganic nasals as the
> initial member of a cluster, EXCEPT for a few oddballs; Finnish has /ps ks/
> here, but you could have a different selection. Rechecking your phonology,
> /v\ L/ could be used for Hungarian-ish flavor; or some subset of /c k q ?/
> for appearing more exotic...
Indeed. I already know that Velyan allows /qs/. It's not entirely what you
mean, but whereas in Finnish the presence of /s/ in a cluster stops consonant
gradation dead, in Velyan, it doesn't - but there are certain clusters which
would be predicted by gradation, if they weren't excluded by the phonology*
(e.g. /st/ -> */sr/). In this situation (and others), Velyan metathesises
(sp) the consonants, so /st/ -> /rs/. (This also means that the products of
consonant gradation of /st/ and /ts/ fall together, i.e. /ts/ also -> /rs/.)

Jeff

*BTW, where is the boundary between "phonology" and "phonotactics", and
does "tonology" ("tonotactics?") fit in there or form a
separate "discipline"?

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