cmloegcmluin wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 3:25 am
I'm not aware of any evidence that /kw/ is a difficult consonant combination for the average human. Though I agree that if it collapsed to /k/ we'd have a problem. And we'd also have a problem if some speakers collapsed it to /w/ since that's the language-permitting alternative to /dʒɐt/ ("jat").
Romance languages usually use <qu> to denote just /k/ for some reason (<quinientos> /kinientos/ 'five hundred' in Spanish, <cinquante> /sãkãt/ 'fifty' in French), which might cause people to collapse it to /k/ if they don't realize.
I needed to verify that it was pretty common cross-linguistically, and I found this
https://phoible.org/parameters which appears to be a ranking of all phonemes' popularity across all languages, which is pretty darn awesome if that's the case!
Yup! I've also seen it used in
this series reviewing conlangs to verify that a preaspirated bilabial nasal /ʰm/ occurs in "approximately no languages".
...the initial "ng" problem...
Note that /ŋ/ is also only allowed to appear in the coda of a syllable in Mandarin Chinese (and yes, pinyin romanizes it as <ng>). Also Japanese phonotactics are pretty well-represented by the holes in the kana syllabary: there's a grand total of one consonant that's allowed to appear in the coda of a syllable, and the only consonant clusters that appear are /tʃ/ and /ts/, which are analyzed as allophones of /t/ except in loanwords.
A random guy who sometimes doodles about Sagittal and microtonal music in general in his free time.