Definitely. Some not-so-outlandish natlang examples that come to mind:sangi39 wrote:Anyway, I want to get rid of the plosive-initial clusters of the language and I think I've come up with 2 solutions (other than the one I posted before):
Pre-Solution: Add epenthetic schwa after word-final clusters then either,
1) Simply remove plosives in coda position and when followed by /r/ or /l/ word initially, or
2) Delete word-final plosives and then analyse plosive-initial clusters as syllable onsets both word-initially and word-internally (with other clusters being divided between syllables with the second plosive element being the onset of the second syllable). Plosive-initial clusters then undergo changes similar to written (classical?) to modern Tibetan (as seen here), e.g. *pr > tr (then to tʂ in this case), *kl > l and so on.
I like the idea of 2 (that way I could have fun treating i- and u- initial diphthongs as j- and w-final consonant clusters with similar changes) but I'm note sure about "analyse plosive-initial clusters as syllable onsets" having only come across it briefly here:
I don't know if this kind of syllabification can actually have any bearing on future sound changes or not.Wikipedia wrote:Most commonly, a single consonant between vowels is grouped with the following syllable (i.e. /CV.CV/), while two consonants between vowels are split between syllables (i.e. /CVC.CV/). In some languages, however, such as Old Church Slavonic, any group of consonants that can occur at the beginning of a word is grouped with the following syllable; hence, a word such as pazdva would be syllabified /pa.zdva/.
- The muta cum liquida rule in Latin: Clusters of a plosive followed by a liquid are syllabified as an onset, which means that the preceding syllable is not "heavy", which means that the word accent may fall on the antepenult instead of the penult. This rule had lots of exceptions, and many words that should have been affected by it eventually developed penultimate stress in all major Romance languages (e.g. Latin INTEGRVM 'whole' /ˈin.te.ɡrum/ > VL *entégro > Spanish entero /en'te.ɾo/, French entier /ɑ̃ˈtje/, Portuguese enteiro /ẽˈtej.ɾʊ/ etc.), but these outcomes would have been quite different if the accent had stayed on the antepenultimate, and while I can't think of any clear examples, I'm sure there are a few words somewhere which actually did retain antepenultimate stress.
- Syllable-final devoicing in contemporary German: In my own idiolect, which is not too far from the standard, intervocalic "muta cum liquida" clusters are almost always syllabified as a coda plosive plus an onset liquid, which means that voiced plosives become voiceless in this position, e.g. abreißen 'rip off' [ˈʔap.ʁaɪ.sn̩]. When preceded by another consonant, the same clusters are syllabified as a complex onset and remain voiced (or at least noticeably lenis), even if the preceding consonant is voiceless: ausbreiten 'spread out' [ˈʔaʊs.bʁaɪ.tn̩]. For me, the coda devoicing rule even applies within a morpheme, e.g. Adler 'eagle' [ˈʔaːt.lɐ] (a word that many other native speakers would syllabify differently, and thus pronounce as [ˈʔaː.dlɐ]). However, it does not apply after the vocalic allophone of coda /ʁ/: verbreiten 'distribute' [fɐˈbʁaɪ.tn̩] (but note that there's a morpheme boundary at the syllable break here; I don't think you can actually have -ʁCR- clusters within a single native morpheme).
