Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?

In fact the pronunciation ['awa] for _agua_ is very widespread in
Spanish, and I'd expect [NG] to simplify to [N]. In fact humans seem
to find nasal + fricative clusters hard to pronounce and frequently
change them into vowel nasalization + fricative or nasal + stop +
fricative, *especially* in rapid speech (and rapid-speech phenomena
are tomorrow's sound changes!) The former strategy is common in
Swedish and the latter in English. In fact when I try to avoid
pronouncing [aNGa] as [a~Ga] it comes out as [aN\G\R\a]! IMO one
should not judge the naturalness of an artlang phonology by how well
its words and sentences fare when pronounced rapidly. That may be
subject to modification of course when the speakers of the language
are purposed to be non-human. It may of course be that your Elves find
some sound sequences which are hard to humans easy and vice versa! I
use the possible non-humanity of the Sohlosjan as an excuse for the
typologically odd vowel height harmony, although I know of at least
one human language which had vowel height harmony, namely Middle
Korean.

2008/8/16, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:
> Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <melroch@...>:
>
>> Would [Gw] really be possible? One would expect it to simplify to [w]
>> pretty much automatically, at least for human speakers. The [NG]
>> sequence looks pretty alien too!
>
> I don't seem to have any trouble pronouncing either cluster, and I don't see
> why
> you'd expect otherwise. [Gw] occurs in Spanish words like _agua_, and [NG]
> doesn't intuitively strike me as odder than, say, [nz].
>
> --
> Andreas Johansson
>

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/ BP