
In general, the rules of phonotactics operate around the sonority hierarchy, stipulating that the nucleus has maximal sonority and that sonority decreases as you move away from the nucleus. Other languages don't share the same constraint: compare Spanish pliegue or French pluie. Therefore, the pronunciation has been reduced to by elision of the. The cluster, however, infringes the constraint for three-consonantal onsets in English. This constraint can be observed in the pronunciation of the word blue: originally, the vowel of bl ue was identical to the vowel of c ue, approximately. For instance, English allows at most three consonants in an onset, but among native words under standard accents, phonemes in a three-consonantal onset are limited to the following scheme: /s/ + pulmonic + approximant: On this basis it is possible to form rules for which representations of phoneme classes may fill the cluster. The English syllable (and word) twelfths /twɛlfθs/ is divided into the onset /tw/, the nucleus /ɛ/, and the coda /lfθs/, and it can thus be described as CCVCCCC (C = consonant, V = vowel). Rime (obligatory, comprises Nucleus and Coda):īoth onset and coda may be empty, forming a vowel-only syllable, or alternatively, the nucleus can be occupied by a syllabic consonant.Įnglish phonotactics Main article: English phonology#Phonotactics.Syllables have the following internal segmental structure: Similarly, the sounds /kn/ and /ɡn/ are not permitted at the beginning of a word in Modern English but are in German and Dutch, and were permitted in Old and Middle English. For example, in Japanese, consonant clusters like /st/ are not allowed, although they are in English. Phonotactic constraints are language specific.

Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints. Phonotactics (in Greek phone = voice and tactic = course) is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes.
