kodé wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 10:42 pmMuskogee (indigenous to SE north America) has this, and IIRC you also see it in some Iroquoian and Algonquian languages.
Source?
For Muskogee, it’s Jack Martin’s (2011) grammar. Underlyingly, you don’t have #sC or Cs# clusters, but vowel deletion creates them on the surface, while it doesn’t create other clusters.
For other languages of Eastern North America, I wasn’t thinking of a particular citation (or language!), just based on what I’ve read on these languages. I’ll see if I can find you a source…
kodé wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 10:42 pm
My guess is that /s/ (and other fricatives) are common as syllable- (or word-) margins due to their audibility. For /s/, at least, since it involves just the front of the tongue, it’s pretty easy to combine articulatorily with labials or dorsal, at least.
An interesting example of fricatives as syllable margins is Dayang Pumi, which allows, in addition to the sibilant-sibilant initials /sʃ zʒ ɕʃ/, the clusters of fricative and homorganic plosive /ɸp ɸpʰ βb st stʰ zd ʃtʃ ʃtʃʰ ʒdʒ χq χqʰ ʁɢ/, and no other fricative-obstruent clusters.
And to further define their audibility, such fricatives enjoy a relatively high frequency in terms of pitch — and also, their pitch can be adjusted — combined with malleable duration. One can adjust subglottalic pressure to increase their ... force (I am not sure exactly what metric is being adjusted here) ... In all these senses, they (and nasals and liquids, which can also occupy similar syllable margin roles) have more in common with vowels than with other consonants.
bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2024 4:28 am
What does it even mean for a language to be ‘too big’ or ‘too small’? It’s just… how the language works. If you dislike their phonaesthetic, fine, but please don’t pretend it’s some kind of objective judgement. (For instance, I suspect you’d greatly dislike Coptic and Dorig [see section 4.2], which are two of my favourites when it comes to phonotactics.)
I'm of the opinion that language can be enjoyed most purely without bias getting in the way through listening to verbal art: through songs, poetry, through theatre. You get to really hear the best of a language.