Re: basic two-consonant clusters in English

On Oct 16, 4:15 pm, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Oct 16, 4:06 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Oct 16, 1:27 pm, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Oct 13, 7:24 pm, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Oct 13, 12:24 pm, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I wish to limit myself to p,t,k,b,d,g for the time being.

Are statistics available as to the frequency of occurrence of the 36
possibilities?

The first interesting juxtaposition I can think of is in
'blackguard'. M-W gives three pronunciations - in two of which the
'k' isn't sounded.

next question:

is "backed down" homophonous with "back down"?

Probably. But they can't occur in identical environments, so (a) one
can't be sure and (b) it doesn't matter.

It has nothing to do with your idiotic claim about /gd/, however.
It's /k#d/ all the way.-

Since I wrote

At first I thought kd would be difficult to maintain in speech, but
then we have smackdown and back down, attack dog etc. where the 'k'
is easy to maintain (and substituting g would stand out as poor
speech
pretty obviously) and sure enough they are spelt with 'ck'.

end quote

Its pretty clear who the idiot is.

Yeah -- someone who would think the spelling has any effect on
phonological processes.
.

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