What is a combination of consonants in words

“Suddenly a friend became sad, soon he will meet an enemy again...” But why did the reader of these lines also become sad? Empathy for the lyrical hero? Undoubtedly. But there is also something invisible at first glance. What if you try to read the sentence out loud? Get ready for the tongue to shake and explode. Let's figure out what a consonant cluster is. It will be interesting.

Cluster of consonants: how many?

“Vdr”, “vzgr”, “stn”, even the strange “sdr” at the junction of words... Such a number of consonants per square centimeter is clearly too much for the language of the average person. And this phenomenon is called simply and figuratively: a confluence of consonants. What is this?

To clearly explain what a confluence of consonants is, let’s look at what is called the norm and deviation from it in any language. From a phonetic point of view, the most convenient scheme for pronunciation is alternating vowel and consonant sounds. It is no coincidence that words like “mother”, “baba”, “bibi” are most quickly and easily picked up by children from adults. Such words are convenient for learning in any foreign language.

Consonant cluster

Sometimes this term refers only to a cluster of consonants found in one syllable. By another definition, the term includes sequences of consonants at the junction of syllables (or even words). By the first definition, the clusters in the word extra are /ks/ and /tr/, while by the second definition they are /kstr/ (or /kstʃr/ in some dialects).

Related concepts

Mentions in literature

Related concepts (continued)

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What about them?

It is not for nothing that the Italian language is considered one of the most melodic. The abundance of vowels and their frequent alternation with consonants makes the speech ringing and iridescent, which is only worth the well-known “amore” or “cinema”.

Also within normal limits is a cluster of two consonants. Many Russian words, for example, “friend”, “enemy”, “zvon”, “cry”, are included in this group. The German language is known for its diverse combinations of consonants. “Schmetterling”, “Duft”, “Schritt” - these words are expressive in their own way, beautiful in their clarity and also easy to remember.

But the Serbian and Czech languages are less fortunate. “Chrli vrkh,” which simply means “black peak,” sounds infernal. And behind the ominous “trdlo” lies a delicious bun. And these are not exceptions at all.

The Georgian language breaks records for hard to pronounce words. Just look at the value of “gvprtskvnis” - nine consecutive and separately pronounced consonants. In English there is a word latchstring (latch string) - 6 consonants in a row. It is worth noting that there are 5 sounds in this combination [latchstring]. We hasten to reassure all English learners that such a combination of consonants is rare. The maximum here is 4 consonants in the plural forms: attempts, bursts, as well as in ordinal numbers sixth, twelfth.

Words with three consonants are also common in the Russian language. “Sigh”, “cry”, “adult”, “strive”, “revenge”... You can easily notice that such noisy trios occur (and here’s another example!) at the beginning of a word. This option is still more or less acceptable. But the short forms of some adjectives can make you smile. Round, kind, dull, callous - is it possible to say about a person “He is callous” and not smile? Even if this characterization is true. Why does this happen?

Borrowing

The consonant sequence in a borrowed word does not necessarily follow the rules of phonotactics of the borrowing language. So, the Ubykh root psta

, borrowed from the Adyghe language, violates the Ubykh language rules of “no more than two consonants at the beginning of a word”;
In addition, the English words sphere
/sfɪər/ and
Sphinx
/sfɪŋks/ of Greek origin violate the English prohibition of two fricative consonants at the beginning of a word. See also optimality theory.

On the other hand, in borrowings various ways of eliminating unacceptable initial combinations of consonants are often observed. One of them is to simplify the initial combination. For example, Estonian forms: kool from 'school', tool 'chair'. Another way is to add an initial vowel (this phenomenon is called prosthesis). Examples with the same words from the Andean language (Dagestan): /iʃkol/ 'school', /ustul/ 'table'[6].

Where consonants merge

The whole point is where the consonant combination occurs: at the end of the word, in its middle or at the beginning. As a rule, the beginning of any word is pronounced with greater vocal power and speed. This makes it easier to articulate several consonants in a row, as if they are flying through the air. Hence the hidden energy of the word “explosion” - the combination of consonants here describes this phenomenon perfectly. The words “takeoff” and “shot” are similar in effect. Very often such words denote a sharp, impetuous and short-term action. Agree that such a combination of consonants is very justified. And beautiful.

Words with a cluster of consonants at the end, on the contrary, sound ponderous. Cedar, beaver, fact... However, as soon as a vowel sound becomes at the end of a word, the combination of consonants is almost lost: “tundra”. The same thing happens with plural forms: “cedars”, “facts”. But the genitive plural forms of some nouns may well slow down the pace of speech: “feelings”, “actions”, “sets”.

consonant cluster

See what a “confluence of consonants” is in other dictionaries:

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The meeting place can be changed

Speaking about the “meeting place”, one cannot fail to mention the random combination of consonants at the junction of words or morphemes . A classic example from a bad poem for children: “The baby doll is furious.” With such a pandemonium of voiceless consonants, not only the baby doll will go crazy! Whistling [s] and [z] completely dissolve the innocent [v] between them, erase the boundaries of words and, when pronounced quickly, make the phrase difficult to understand.

Counterstrategy, filterpress, burgomastership, denationalization... These monsters in letter form are just words that are not very lucky with prefixes and suffixes. Often the foreign origin of either the prefix (counter-), or the root (burgomaster), or both roots (filter and press) is to blame. It is worth rejoicing that such words, as a rule, have a narrow specialization.

Falling out of the clip

Hello! It's so easy to say this word. But writing is not very good. Three consonants at the beginning and four in the middle make one of the friendliest words seem forbidding. But what did human language do? Very simple. I removed the indistinct sound [v] from the pronunciation. Some go even further, shortening it to “hello”, “drast” or “darova”. The bottom line is that if a word is used very often in everyday speech, its pronunciation should not make conversation difficult. “Sun”, “late”, “heart”, “godfather” in oral speech have happily lost inconvenient consonants that unnecessarily strain the tongue. But look at the cognates “sunny”, “to be late”, “cordial”, “baptism”. Very similar, but different words. The consonant sequence in them is divided into two parts by vowels, and each consonant sound receives its own portion of power.

Phonotactics

Phonotactics (identification of patterns of combination of phonemes [3]) of a language determines which combinations of consonants are permissible in a given language.

Short clusters

Many languages are "strict" in terms of consonant clusters. Many languages prohibit consonant clusters entirely, such as Hawaiian and most Malayo-Polynesian languages. Japanese is almost as strict, but allows a sequence of a nasal consonant plus another consonant, as in Honshu

[honɕuː].
Literary Arabic and most other Semitic languages prohibit the confluence of consonants at the beginning of a word, and more than two consecutive consonants in other positions. However, modern Hebrew allows two consonants at the beginning of a word[4] (e.g. pkak
"plug";
dlaat
"pumpkin"); Moroccan Arabic, influenced by Berber languages, also contains numerous consonant clusters[5].

Khmer, like most languages of the Mon-Khmer family, only allows initial clusters of up to three consonants per syllable. In Finnish, initial clusters are found only in southwestern dialects and in external loanwords, and only clusters of three consonants within a word are allowed. Most spoken languages and dialects, however, are more liberal. Burmese allows clusters of up to three consonants in writing (an initial and two medials /-j-/, /-w-/), but only two (an initial and one medial) are pronounced. These clusters are limited to certain letters. Some Burmese dialects allow clusters of up to four consonants (with the addition of a medial /-l-/, which can combine with the above medials.

Long clusters

At the other extreme are languages that allow very long clusters. For example, the Kartvelian languages of Georgia. Clusters of four, five or six consonants are not uncommon in Georgian. For example, /brt'q'ɛli/ ( flat

) /mt͡s'vrtnɛli/ (
trainer
) and /prt͡skvna/ (
flaking
).
If affixes are taken into account, clusters eight consonants long occur: /ɡvbrdɣvnis/ ( he plucks us
). Consonants cannot be the nucleus of a syllable in Georgian, so this syllable is analyzed as CCCCCCCCVC.

The neighboring but unrelated language Armenian also allows for the existence of large clusters. For example, “k̕rt̕mndzhal” in classical transliteration and khghchmtank̕

քրթմնջալ / kʰɾtʰmnd͡ʒɑl / ("grumble") and խղճմտանք / χʁt͡ʃmtɑnkʰ / ("conscience") begin with eight consonants, although in the Armenian alphabet and in the modern Romanization of the Armenian alphabet, words begin with more than six consonants , are rare.

Many Slavic languages also have very complex consonant sequences. For example, in Slovak the words štvrť

/ʃtvr̩tʲ/ (“quarter”), and
žblnknutie
/ʒbl̩ŋknutje/ (“heavy blow”) and the Slovenian word
skrbstvo
/skrbstʋo/ (“welfare”).
However, the smooth consonants /r/ and /l/ can form a syllable in West Slavic and South Slavic languages, in which case they behave phonologically like vowels. An example of a true consonant cluster at the beginning of a word is the Polish word wszczniesz
(/fʂt͡ʂɲɛʂ/ (“start, raise (noise, quarrel, fight)”) In the Serbo-Croatian word
opskrbljivanje
/ɔpskr̩bʎiʋaɲɛ/ (“food supply”) lj and nj are digraphs, representing the consonants [ʎ] and [ɲ], respectively.

Some Salish languages have long words with no vowels at all. For example, in the Nuhalk language the word /xɬp'χʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡s'/: he had at his disposal a bunchberry plants

. It is very difficult to classify precisely which of these consonants can function as a syllable nucleus, and these languages complicate the classical concept of a syllable. The same problem occurs in the Northern Berber languages.

East Asian languages

In East Asian languages (such as Chinese and Vietnamese), there is a tendency to shorten and simplify consonant clusters. Ancient Chinese contained additional medials such as /r/ and/or /l/, which have been lost in Middle Chinese and Modern Chinese. The word 江, pronounced "jiang" in modern Chinese and "kong" in Cantonese, was most likely formerly pronounced "klong" or "krung". Moreover, according to recent reconstructions, there were initial clusters of "tk" and "sn" in ancient Chinese, from which palatalized sibilants developed. Old Vietnamese was also rich in initial clusters, but these gradually merged with the simple initials in Middle Vietnamese, and some clusters became nasal consonants.

Is there such a thing as too much publicity?

We have already figured out that many consonants in a row are bad and inconvenient for smooth human speech. But what about long vowel sequences?

Audio equipment, hydroaeroionization, radioactivity... It is easy to notice that vowel combinations occur at the junction of stems in compound words. As a rule, these are complex scientific terms that we rarely use in everyday life. If you try to read such words out loud, you will hear that they are involuntarily divided into two or three shorter ones (according to the number of stems). However, vowels are easier to handle due to the greater participation of the voice in their pronunciation.

Tongue Twisters

It would seem that a confluence of consonants is an ideal phenomenon for tongue twisters. This is where everyone's tongues are smashed to smithereens! Let's analyze the most popular tongue twisters in the Russian language.

Sasha walked along the highway and sucked on a dryer.
Grass in the yard, firewood on the grass. Don't cut wood on the grass in your yard.
In the shallows we lazily caught burbot and exchanged the burbot for tench. Was it not you who sweetly begged me for love, who beckoned me into the mists of the Liman.

It turned out to be a very motley picture. Well-known tongue twisters, it turns out, do not contain a single mind-blowing combination of consonants! The maximum here is two consonants in a row [dr], [tr], [shk]. But these combinations are widespread and do not cause difficulties.

Basically, tongue twisters are aimed at honing simple consonant-vowel syllables that are similar to each other. Thus, tongue twister improves the pace and fluency of speech at the same time.

There are several tongue twisters with consonant clusters. However, they are not so well known.

Wipe the portrait. Wipe the portrait carefully.
Maintaining a vehicle is more expensive than spending money on transport.
The route was routed, but was not routed.

Such verbal exercises will not make speech more elegant, and therefore it is better to still use the old, tried and tested fruits of folk art.

Russian

It is believed that long clusters (four or more consonants in a row) disrupt the euphony of speech [8].

Even M.V. Lomonosov, speaking about the sound organization of speech, recommended “preserving the obscene consonant combination of consonants, for example: “of all the senses, the gaze is nobler,” because six consonants placed side by side - vst-vz

, the language is quite stuttering”[9]

Clusters of four consonants are not frequent in the Russian language, but they occur both at the beginning of a word (“vstreppenutsya”) and at the end (“callous”, “acquaintances”).

There are no triple (or more) combinations of consonants at the beginning and at the end of a root in the Russian language.[10] In the Russian language, combinations of consonants predominate, constructed in accordance with the law of ascending sonority of a syllable, that is, a noisy consonant (voiceless or voiced) plus a sonorant one (“gr”, “dr”, “kl”, “pl”, “cm”, “zn” ", "evil")[8].

There are also longer clusters with one word: bo drstv

counter

example,
counter
proposal,
counter
lead,
counter order
,
splash
,
look
.