Re: English syllable structure

Fabian wrote:
>My Jeyn script that I invented (html lost in a pc crash alas) attempted to
>codify English syllables. Essentially, each glyph constituted a valid
>consonant cluster or a valid vowel cluster as defined within English
>phonosyntactics. English is essentially (C)C(C)V(V)(V)(C)(C)(C) in
>syllable structure. But there are more restrictions.
>
>
>C1: s, S (voiced to match C2)
>
>C2: any except N
>
>C3: w, l, r, y
>
>Vowels: There are essentially 20-25 different vowels in English, depending
>on dialect, counting diphtongs and triphthongs as well.
>
>C4: w, l, r, y, [nasal]
>
>C5: any except h
>
>C6: s, t (voiced to match C5)
>
>There are numerous restrictions on what exactly is valid (/tl/ is right
>out forex), and doubtless there are some things not adequately covered by
>this summary, but this covers nearly every case.

At some point in early student days, I saw a schematic of the (US) Engl.
monosyllable structure, which used curly brackets, parens, plus and minus
signs etc. so that all bases were covered.   It took up most of a printed
page.

Then too you have to decide how inclusive to be:  natively, /S/ only
precedes /r/, but if you include germanisms and yiddishisms it occurs more
widely, 'spiel, schlemiehl, schmuck etc'.  /labial-w.../ occurs only in the
loan 'bwana'; /Cj.../ only if followed by /uw/, except for 'piano' and
'chiaroscuro'etc. etc. But certain things are totally no-no, of course.

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