Language-specific phonotactics

Languages differ in the different syllabic structures they allow, in terms of how many consonants can begin or end a syllable, whether vowels can begin syllables, and whether both open and closed syllables are possible.

It is a structural fact about accents of the English language, for instance, that the maximum number of consonants that can make up an English onset at the beginning of an isolated word is three. The first of these can only be /s/, the second has to be selected from /p, t, k/, and the third from/r, 1, w, j/: splayed, strayed, scrape, spume, stewed, skewed, squish, squawk, squeal. The syllables in all the above examples show the structure CCCVC. Notice that when the third consonant is /w/, then the first two consonants in English are obliged to be /s/ and /k/. There are some further combinatorial constraints between these units in an initial cluster of three consonants: /spr/ and /str/ are both permitted in English but /spw/ and /stw/ are not legitimate occurrences within the same syllable.

According to John Laver, English is somewhat unusual in allowing syllabic onsets of a maximum of three consonants. Most languages do not allow as many. However J. Laver adds more examples of the sort from Arabic and Serbo-Croatian, and the languages of the Caucasus noting that each language which allows three-consonant onsets sets its own structural constraints on the cluster. There is more freedom of combination in Serbo-Croatian, while Georgian syllable-initial clusters can range from two to six (Laver 1995).

To this we can add that Russian, like Serbo-Croatian, enjoys greater freedom of combinability in initial three-consonant clusters, while in a four-consonant cluster the first sound must be /в/: встряхнуть, всплакнуть.

English and Russian, like the majority languages of the world, permit zero-consonant onsets, that is syllables beginning with a vowel (uncovered): English end, eel, ox, Russian он, ухо, op. However, a number of Amerindian languages do not allow this vowel-onset structure. They all must have a consonant onset. A few languages have a glottal stop {hard attack) before a vowel opening a word to substitute for a missing consonant. Most speakers of the languages are not aware of that feature.

Another example. Hawaiian and Finnish, although they do permit zero-consonant onsets to word-initial syllables, as well as syllables starting with a consonant, differ from English and Russian in that they cannot begin with more than one consonant.

English and Russian allow open syllables and closed syllables. The number of final consonants in closed syllables in English can range from one to four consonants, as msick (CVC), six (CVCC), sixth (CVCCC) and sixths (CVCCCC).

In Russian the maximum number of consonants in coda is three. In many West African languages and also in Japanese only open syllables are phonologically permitted. When words originally made up of closed syllables are borrowed into Etsako (a West African language), the speakers regularize the syllable-structure form to conform to the rules of Etsako phonology: bread (CCVC) becomes [buredi]. A similar example comes from Turkish where the English loan-word sport is naturalized as [si'por] because Turkish does not allow /s/ and /p/ to occur next to each other at the beginning of a syllable.

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