Re: basic two-consonant clusters in English

On Oct 17, 9:15 am, 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.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

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.

Well, it's not clear to me yet.
Your claim about /gd/ was on the other thread, and has been reduced to
near-vacuity.
I don't know what you were getting at in the above. Was it your claim
that the k would be voiced in "breakdown" (something for which we
still have no more than your assertion)? Weren't you trying to claim
that <k> spellings would assimilate and <ck> spellings would not?
Still nothing resembling evidence for that. And what does "backed
down" have to do with the main point (assuming there is one)?

Ross Clark
.

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