Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits.
Some linguists argue that the term can be properly applied only to those consonant clusters that occur within one syllable. Others claim that the concept is more useful when it includes consonant sequences across syllable boundaries. According to the former definition, the longest consonant clusters in the word extra would be and, whereas the latter allows, which is phonetically in some accents.
Phonotactics
Languages' phonotactics differ as to what consonant clusters they permit.Many languages are more restrictive than English in terms of consonant clusters. Many languages forbid consonant clusters entirely. Hawaiian, like most Malayo-Polynesian languages, is of this sort. Japanese is almost as strict, but allows a sequence of a nasal or approximant, plus another consonant, as in Honshū , and Tōkyō. Standard Arabic forbids initial consonant clusters and more than two consecutive consonants in other positions. So do most other Semitic languages, although Modern Israeli Hebrew permits initial two-consonant clusters, and Moroccan Arabic, under Berber influence, allows strings of several consonants. Like most Mon–Khmer languages, Khmer permits only initial consonant clusters with up to three consonants in a row per syllable. Finnish has initial consonant clusters natively only on South-Western dialects and on foreign loans, and only clusters of three inside the word are allowed. Most spoken languages and dialects, however, are more permissive. In Burmese, consonant clusters of only up to three consonants at the initial onset are allowed in writing and only two are pronounced. These clusters are restricted to certain letters. Some Burmese dialects allow for clusters of up to four consonants, and —and if grammatical affixes are used, it allows an eight-consonant cluster: . Consonants cannot appear as syllable nuclei in Georgian, so this syllable is analysed as CCCCCCCCVC. Many Slavic languages may manifest almost as formidable numbers of consecutive consonants, such as in the Slovak words štvrť , and žblnknutie and the Slovene word skrbstvo . However, the liquid consonants /r/ and /l/ can form syllable nuclei in West and South Slavic languages and behave phonologically as vowels in this case. An example of a true initial cluster is the Polish word wszczniesz. In the Serbo-Croatian word opskrbljivanje the and are digraphs representing single consonants: and, respectively.
Some Salishan languages exhibit long words with no vowels at all, such as the Nuxálk word : he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant. It is extremely difficult to accurately classify which of these consonants may be acting as the syllable nucleus, and these languages challenge classical notions of exactly what constitutes a syllable. The same problem is encountered in the Northern Berber languages.
There has been a trend to reduce and simplify consonant clusters in East Asian languages, such as Chinese and Vietnamese. Old Chinese was known to contain additional medials such as /r/ and/or /l/, which yielded retroflexion in Middle Chinese and today's Mandarin Chinese. The word 江, read in Mandarin and in Cantonese, is reconstructed as *klong or *krung in Old Chinese by Sinologists like Zhengzhang Shangfang, William H. Baxter, and Laurent Sagart. Additionally, initial clusters such as "tk" and "sn" were analysed in recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, and some were developed as palatalised sibilants. Another element of consonant clusters in Old Chinese were analysed in coda and post-coda position. Some "departing tone" syllables have cognates in the "entering tone" syllables, which feature a -p, -t, -k in Middle Chinese and Southern Chinese varieties. The departing tone was analysed to feature a post-coda sibilant, "s". Clusters of -ps, -ts, -ks, were then formed at the end of syllables. These clusters eventually collapsed into "-ts" or "-s", before disappearing altogether, leaving elements of diphthongisation in more modern varieties. Old Vietnamese also had a rich inventory of initial clusters, but these were slowly merged with plain initials during Middle Vietnamese, and some have developed into the palatal nasal.
Loanwords
Consonant clusters occurring in loanwords do not necessarily follow the cluster limits set by the borrowing language's phonotactics. These limits are called restraints or constraints. A loanword from Adyghe in the extinct Ubykh language, psta, violates Ubykh's limit of two initial consonants. Also, the English words sphere and sphinx, Greek loanwords, violate the rule that two fricatives may not appear adjacently word-initially.English
In English, the longest possible initial cluster is three consonants, as in split, strudel, strengths, and "squirrel", all beginning with or and ending with,, or and the second one is /p/, /t/ or /k/; the longest possible final cluster is five consonants, as in angsts in some dialects, though that is rare. However, the can also be considered epenthetic; for many speakers, nasal-sibilant sequences in the coda require insertion of a voiceless stop homorganic to the nasal. For speakers without this feature, the word is pronounced without the. Final clusters of four consonants, as in sixths, twelfths, bursts and glimpsed, are more common. Within compound words, clusters of five consonants or more are possible, as in handspring and in the Yorkshire place-name of Hampsthwaite.It is important to distinguish clusters and digraphs. Clusters are made of two or more consonant sounds, while a digraph is a group of two consonant letters standing for a single sound. For example, in the word ship, the two letters of the digraph together represent the single consonant. Conversely, the letter can produce the consonant clusters /ks/, /gz/, /kʃ/, or /gʒ/. It is worth noting that often produces sounds in two different syllables. Also note a combination digraph and cluster as seen in length with two digraphs, representing a cluster of two consonants: ; lights with a silent digraph followed by a cluster, : ; and compound words such as sightscreen or catchphrase.
Korean
In Modern Hangul there are 11 consonant-clusters: ㄳ, ㄵ, ㄶ, ㄺ, ㄻ, ㄼ, ㄽ, ㄾ, ㄿ, ㅀ, ㅄ. These come as the final consonant in a syllabic block and refer to consonant letters, not consonant sounds. They instead influence the consonant of the next syllable. However, Middle Korean did have consonant clusters, as evidenced by double consonant clusters in initial position as well as triple consonants in both positions.Frequency of clusters
Not all consonant clusters are distributed equally among the languages of the world. Consonant clusters have a tendency to fall under patterns such as the sonority sequencing principle, wherein the closer a consonant in a cluster is from the syllable's vowel, the more sonorous the consonant is. Among the most common types of clusters are initial stop-liquid sequences, such as in Thai. Other common ones include initial stop-approximant and initial fricative-liquid sequences. More rare are sequences which defy the SSP such as Proto-Indo-European /st/ and /spl/. Certain consonants are more or less likely to appear in consonant clusters, especially in certain positions. The Tsou language of Taiwan has initial clusters such as /tf/, which doesn't violate the SSP, but nonetheless is unusual in having the labio-dental /f/ in the second position. The cluster /mx/ is also rare, but occurs in Russian words such as мха.Consonant clusters at the ends of syllables are less common, but follow the same principles. The cluster is more likely to begin with a liquid, approximant, or nasal and end with a fricative, affricate, or stop, such as in English "world" /wəld/. Yet again, there are exceptions, such as English "lapse" /læps/.