Talk:Phonotactics

No onset /ŋ/ or /ʒ/?

What about pleasure and azure? Those are the classic examples of /ʒ/ and both have syllables that begin with /ʒ/. 63.247.160.139 (talk) 23:10, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Maybe. Many phonologists believe that the /ʒ/ in those words is in the coda of the first syllable rather than the onset of the second. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:01, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Who? Who are these "many phonologists" you refer to? The requirement for a syllable onset is the universally unmarked state, whereas syllables with codas are universally more marked than codaless ones - so much so that English entirely lacks onsetless syllables - any syllable that would otherwise begin with a vowel has an epenthetic glottal stop inserted to satisfy the onset requirement (if you're a native speaker, just try it out for yourself: say the word "Anna" a few times in a row and you'll feel it, and if you still don't believe me, record yourself speaking and plot it out in PRAAT or similar software and you'll see the acoustic "bump" in the waveform where the glottis closed and reopened, and a sudden transition to the vowel in the spectrogram). Using your logic, pleasure and azure should be pronounced *'plɛʒ.ʔɚ and *'æʒ.ʔɚ. Quite literally the only counterexample I can think of is Breen's analysis of Arrernte, and that's hardly an uncontroversial subject in and of itself. 79.176.36.183 (talk) 09:52, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Even if that were accepted, it would be hard to account for a word like <genre>. 2001:18E8:2:11B5:F000:0:0:81B (talk) 06:15, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

No onset /ŋ/ is English one of the main difficulties for English speakers learning the Māori_language. Māori does have onset /ŋ/,, e.g. ngā /ŋā/ = the (plural definite article). Nick Mulgan (talk) 02:26, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Theoretically permissible/foreign vs. outright impermissible?

There seem to be two basic kinds of phonotactic constraints:

• Sounds that do not occur in the language, but that native speakers have little trouble articulating when pressed, and that are readily pronounced if imported as a foreign word (e.g., English borrowings Tlingit, sphere, Sbarro). An ending cluster such as "lzh" doesn't occur in English, and is forbidden by most lists of English phonotactics, but a native Anglophone could and probably would pronounce it if it formed part of a foreign loanword (**"dalzh," etc.).
• Sounds that native speakers cannot pronounce, or can pronounce only with great difficulty. In this latter case, native speakers substitute for the sound (vowel insertion, metathesis, etc.) or simplify it (e.g., /kn/ > /n/) if obliged to say the word. For this sort of phonotactic constraint, consider the initial clusters in foreign words such as xylem and Tbilisi.

Point is, these two sorts of phonotactic constraint seem fundamentally different in ways that should be basic to any discussion of phonotactics, and phonotactic investigations that ignore that distinction seem fundamentally wrongfooted. Do the major academic sources bear this out? And if not, why not?

Examples Needed

When listing consonant formations, examples of words that include those formations aren't just helpful, they're practically mandatory.2600:1702:3940:92D0:BD67:4531:9ABF:CA1D (talk) 08:14, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Graduate Phonology

— Assignment last updated by Ashf1879 (talk) 12:32, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Removal of entire section

IMO this edit, removing the entire "In other languages" section, ought to have been discussed first. No reason has been stated in the edit summary either. --Pegasovagante (talk) 06:29, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Affricates in Complex Onsets

Although /dʒɹ/ and /tʃɹ/ exist only in place of /dɹ/ and /tɹ/, it stills seems contradictory to state "no affricates or /h/ in complex onsets" while the "English phonotactics" section (correctly) lists the word stream as an example of an affricate within a complex onset. Robdawg344 (talk) 18:14, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

— Assignment last updated by DnaCollector (talk) 01:27, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Japanese

I would replace the new stub-section on Japanese with something about CV languages in general – or at the very least remove the mention of hiragana; phonotactics and notation are different things. (Linear B is an open syllabary, but Greek was never a CV language.) The high number of homophones in Japanese is due less to its simple syllables than to its Procrustean simplification of Chinese one-syllable morphemes; a language with a limited set of syllables can avoid homophones by using multiple syllables per morpheme. —Tamfang (talk) 21:02, 4 March 2025 (UTC)