Re: Consonant clusters

En réponse à Christopher Bates <christopher.bates@...>:

> What are the most common consonant clusters allowed in languages? I've
> been trying to think of what english uses. It seems to have:
>
> nasal + stop (at same place of articulation) eg went, wand, jump, mb
> (can't think of a word offhand with that one in) For some reason we
> don't have ngk or ngg...
Well, ngk is extremely common, as has been said earlier. It's just that it's
written "nk".

 Although of course for some reason these
> combinations don't occur at the beginning of words, just the end.
>
> stop + approximant eg train plane
>
> s + unvoiced stop + approximant eg splash string
>
> What else? I'm trying to think... which patterns are most common?
>
There is what has been called on the list the "Sonority Contour Principle" or
something like that. It states that the syllable peak will be the most sonorant
phone of the syllable, and phones around will go from it with decreasing
sonority, the order of sounds from most sonorant to least sonorant being:
vowels>approximants>laterals, trills, flaps, nasals>fricatives>stops.

According to this principle, most beginning consonant clusters will be of order
less sonorant-most sonorant. So [tS], [sw], [kw], [pr], [dl], [ks], [tlj] would
tend to appear easily, while [mb], [vd], [zg], [jlk] should not occur. The
order is the opposite at the end of the syllable.

Of course, languages are quite rebellious little things and tend not to follow
principles. Thus English and many languages allow initial [st] or final [tS],
French has quite a lot of words with final [pR], Polish litterally adores
initial [zd], and I'm not mentioning Georgian ;)))) .

Other things are probably working there: clusters with disagreeing voicing are
rare (so you expect [ks] but not [gs]), somehow clusters stop+nasal are not
very common ([kn] has disappeared from English, but is still present in other
Germanic languages, but not in Romance ones for instance (Although it doesn't
mean much. Old French seemed not to be able to pronounce initial [w] and
borrowed Germanic words beginning with this sound by replacing it with [gw])

The problem of consonant clusters is a complex one, and I'm not sure that
frequency studies have been made cross-linguistically about it (I mean, real
ones, with representative samples from every known language family :)) ).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

Replies