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I would like to kno about the noraml acquisition of consonants clusters. What are we supposed to expect at 2 years of age? (English) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.17.139.247 ( talk • contribs) 21:13, 30 November 2004
How is rhythm a six-part consonant cluster? The y is a pronounced as a vowel. The way I hear it, there are two consonant clusters in "rhythm", "rh" and "thm". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bryce ( talk • contribs) 14:18, 15 June 2005
rhythm in english is a 4 (or 5) phoneme, 2 syllable word [rIDm] (sorry, can't remember my SAMPA), there is most definitely a vowel.. [r] [I] [D] and a syllabic [m] (or schwa + m if you subscribe to that line of thinking). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Exit ( talk • contribs) 00:16, 3 July 2005
i'd like to rewite some of this to be less misleading, because for example in slovak, r and l can be vocalic, so a word presented like štvrťžblnknutie may appear to be only 2 syllables (because there are 2 vowel nuclei), but in fact it is 4 syllables long: štvrť.žbln.knu.tie, where the r and the l are syllabic, so why is the word presented as an example of a 'formidable consonant cluster'? each syllable has at most a 3 consonant onset, which is hardly formidable.
also, the statement: the Georgian gvbrdγvnis is an example of this type, containing four syllables, but only one vowel...
what is the syllable breakdown? gv.brd.γv.nis? do not these syllables have a vocalic nucleus? if so, that means 3 of those consonants aren't parts of the clusters.... which according to the syllable breakdown i've written, there aren't any clusters at all if you look at it on a per-syllable basis. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Exit ( talk • contribs) 17:59, 3 July 2005
and the importance of cross-syllable clusters? are there any references for this? i've never heard mention of this before.
Exit 3 July 2005 17:59 (UTC)
i'm a student of tbilisi state university of the faculty of georgian linguistics, and more, i'm georgian and my native language is georgian. that means i can help you to understand and do not leave any doubts about georgian consonant clusters. georgian language is one of the very rear languages (or the only), where everything is read totaly the same way it is written. i mean that every phonem (or just phonetic sound) has only one letter, that expreses it. and any time when this letters are written, there can be read strictly the same. for example a word sheuratsxhk'ops is read /sheuratsxhk'ops/ :-) (there are 4 consonants /ts/, /x/, /h/, /k'/). and there is strictly 4 syllables (she.u.ratsx.hk'ops). and yes, the word /gvbrdghvnis/ is strictly only onesyllabical. if you listen to georgian speaking, or better, georgian poems, where this word is used. you would discover that i'm right. and there is nothing scary about it. caucasian people have very free articulation, and this kind of things is not problem for us. :D
but i'm going to tell you that, there is consonant cluster whith 9 consonants in word /gvprtxlvnis/ (he is making us to be always scary) in georgian. it's a grammatical form of word /prtxla/ (a creature that is always scary). but it's is not an literatural form, that's why no one has written about it yet, but in dialects and slang it exists! and maybe there are moreconsonantic clusters in regional goergian or georgian slang that i can't remember at the moment. (sorry for not knowing english well :), if) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexandro Celabreli ( talk • contribs) 11:53, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
i removed the following lines:
The longest consonant cluster in an English word appears in latchspring. The longest consonant cluster anywhere, eight in total, appears in German Angstschweiss (agony sweat).
Certain loan words, like Nietzschean (supporting philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas), which has five, may have even more.
... latchspring may contain 5 consonants in a row, but only 4 spoken across 2 syllables.. [latS.sprIN]...
same thing with the german Angstschweiss ... sch in german is phonetically 1 consonant [S]
and if we are talking about the english pronunciation of Nietzschean, well, it would be pronounced [nitSi@n]... one consonant for all of 'tzsch' in the middle of the word
also, although czech vlk (wolf) doesnt contain any written vowels, the [l] is vocalic.
Exit 8 July 2005 03:44 (UTC)
That's like saying english word /wrd/ has no vowels.
Or that ancient Hebrew was pronounced with no vowels.
A tiny correction to the above rambling; the longest consonant kluster seems to be in the Swedish word borsjtjschlager, nine in total. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.181.100.127 ( talk) 20:42, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Currently the article defines a consonant cluster thus "a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel." Compare this to the definition given here. "A consonant cluster is a group or sequence of consonants that appear together in a syllable without a vowel between them." (emphasis added). Which is correct? I believe it's the latter. I'm about to edit the article accordingly.
I also noticed the following "Japanese is almost as strict, but it allows clusters of n + consonant: Honshu, the name of one of the major islands of Japan, is an example." Yeah, the major island but ... if we keep in mind the above correct definition, we notice something: these groups of /n/ + consonant are not consonant clusters at all because they cross a syllable boundary. However, this is not to say the consonant clusters cannot occur in Japanese. The language does allow consonant plus /j/ as in Tokyo.
Jimp 04:39, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I hadn't read the bit where the article mentions that there is disagreement over which definition is better. This info had been placed way down towards the bottom, though. I've moved it up into the intro where it belongs. Even so, that Japanese example is still a little off considering that the [n] in Honshu is a syllabic consonant and therefore phonologically a vowel. Jimp 06:12, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
I might be wrong here, but I'm almost entirely sure that "he is plucking us" is actually gvprcʼkvnis in Georgian. I'll try to find out which word is correct and then maybe correct the entry if no one objects or can certify the word in the entry. I think I'm going to include Georgian spelling for this word as well... — N-true 18:12, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
In Polish 4-consonant clusters are also not uncommon (e.g. Strwiąż, wstręt, pstry, wstrzymać, wzgląd, wstrzelić, oszczerstw), 5-consonant clusters also sometimes occur (e.g. źdźbłko). Also, you only show examples of clusters within a single word (although I believe Angstschweiß should be counted as 2 words, which in German can be in many cases joined together). If you counted inter-word clusters, you would find even 9-consonant examples in Polish (e.g. słuchać "oszczerstw z wstrętem", wszedł "Herbst z pstrągami") — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sutashu ( talk • contribs) 08:21, 7 June 2007
"The German word Angstschweiß (cold sweat) is another good example."
Uh... and how would that be? 203.154.48.179 13:53, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
Above, User:Angr mentioned the difference between two distinct consonants put together into a cluster (even if the cluster is bridging two syllables, rather than being contained within a single syllable -- I'll leave that a separate issue!) and an affricate, which is generally percieved and pronounced as a single consonant. Contrary to IPA renderings, the English "CH" or "TCH" is (almost?) never pronounced as a "T" followed by an "SH": The word "chew", for example, isn't pronounced in a way that could be equally well rendered as "tshew"; "why choose" and "white shoose" are not homophones, nor are "catch it" and "cat shit" even though "catch up" and "ketchup" are. While most examples of consonant clusters counting affricates as more than one consonant have been removed from the article, I think it would benefit the article to directly address the subject. One thing in particular that I'd like to see addressed is the fact that if one draws out the "CH" sound, it has a sharp, almost tinnient sound compared to a drawn out "SH" sound, as the "CH" is made with the tip of the tongue (with the supposed "T" sound really being incidental to its pronunciation) and the "SH" is made with a much broader area of the tongue contacting the roof of the mouth further back. To be honest, I can't see why IPA stopped using ligatures for the English "CH" and "J" in favor of two seperate symbols for each, when even the ligatures conveyed the (completely incorrect) idea that the English "CH" and "J" each contain more than a single consonantal sound quality, thus calling for exactly the opposite sort of replacement: losing each of the two ligatures with its own, single, distinct symbol. Why a single character is used in IPA to distinguish a combination of two totally different sounds in the case of [ɲ] (made up of an [n] followed by a very distinct [j]), but two characters are needed for a single sound in both the case of the single sound misleadingly rendered [tʃ] and the single sound misleadingly rendered [dʒ] is absolutely inconcievable. The only reason I could possibly think of for this is that the usual pronunciation of these consonants throughout almost the entire Anglosphere radically differs from mine own native dialect of Cascadian English, in which case there would be unique consonants in Cascadian English not represented at all in the IPA. -- Þórrstejn ˡθoɝ.staɪʲn: Hammer of Thor talk 09:59, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
Different words are different syllables. A very brief pause is inserted between syllables. Plus, "white" is often pronounced using a "held T" or "glottal stop" rather than the Initial T. ANd even if you DO use an aspirated t, there will be a slight pause before "sh". Ticklewickleukulele ( talk) 01:20, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
I've been wondering this for a long time: why do "tr", "dr" appear a lot more often than "tl", "dl" in European languages that I've seen (Germanic and Romance mainly)? "tl" and "dl" appear mostly between syllable boundaries, and are rarely ever present in initial and final positions (excluding the syllable "l" right now), while "tr" and "dr" are common enough regardless of whether the "r" is an alveolar approximant, trill, or even an uvular fricative. Similarly, "sl" is more often than "sr", and "vr", "vl", "zr", "zl" are all quite rare (except for "vr" in French)? What quality governs the probability for a certain cluster to appear and to remain in a language?
Keith Galveston ( talk) 07:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
ALL of the examples in foreign (this is the English wikipedia, remember?) languages, currently do not provide transcription! While readers could be expected to know the consonant composition of a word in the language of the article this is definately not the case for other languages. As user Exit said, spelling is not phonetic transcription. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.130.134.65 ( talk) 00:53, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
This article could probably benefit from some sound bites, to show us how exactly things like "/ɡvbrdɣvnis/" sound when said properly. I just can't concieve this word as one syllable at all. - filelake shoe 17:05, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
As a native speaker of American English, I'm painfully aware that our orthography usually doesn't correspond to the actual pronunciation of the word. It's with this in mind that I propose to modify or replace the sentence regarding "twelfths" and "bursts", as /twɛɫfs/ and /bɺs:/ seem to be more common than /twɛɫfθs/ and /bɺsts/, at least in my experience. It seems to me--again, just personal experience--that speakers are tending towards simplifying consonant clusters, especially in clusters involving /θ/. For example, I've heard <paths> (/pʰæðz/ or /pʰæθs/) turn into something like /pʰætʰ.s/ (/t/ distinct /s/); <tooth's> becomes /t̪utʰ.s/ (same as before); <wolves> becomes something like /wɵʊvz/ instead of /wʊɫvz/, and so on. I just think there should be a note about variant pronunciations that simplify consonant clusters, at least in English. Dargueta ( talk) 00:02, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Unbeknownst to the writer the finnish word hamstrata - to hoard like a hamster breaks the 3 rule. so it is not so 4 is possible — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.113.96.60 ( talk) 22:17, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
Consonant clusters are two or more consonants that make one sound as in sh, th, tch, ph, etc. They differ from blends. In a blend such as spl, the sounds blend together but are distinctly separate as in s-p-l-i-t which has four distinct phonemes. In the word "w-i-tch" there are three separate phonemes because tch makes one sound. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.246.187.30 ( talk) 01:28, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Before making light of Georgian clusters, try beating the 12 consecutive consonants in this everyday sentence: "The rankled dirndls tsked strict schmucks" (/ðə ræŋkld dɜrndlz tskt strɪkt ʃmʌks/) (only spoilsports pronounce "tsk" as /tɪsk/). Afasmit ( talk) 23:21, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
In the section on English clusters, it says that a word can have at most 3 consonant phonemes in its initial cluster, however, doesn't the word "strain" have four ( /stʃɹeɪn/ )? Perhaps I have been saying it wrong, though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.107.200.110 ( talk) 21:45, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, twelfths only has 4 consonant sounds in its coda. 166.137.244.62 ( talk) 19:38, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Firstly, I am in no way an expert on language, let alone Armenian, of which I don't even know a word. However, I was curious about Armenian consonant clusters, and I found on Wiktionary that there didn't seem to be very many with more than about three consecutive consonants split between syllables (let alone in the same one). Then I came across an online book about the language. Starting on page 30, it mentions schwa insertion for consonant clusters of length greater than two (and sometimes even in those with two!). In fact, looking at the Armenian Wiktionary pages for the mentioned words ( քրթմնջալ and խղճմտանք) yields a pronunciation with the schwas put in (look directly below the IPA pronunciation to see the word with (ը) inserted), and the English page for քրթմնջալ, (the other word doesn't have an English page) shows the schwas inserted in the IPA. I don't think that Armenian should be removed from the page per se, but instead listed as an example of orthography not matching pronunciation. Though that raises the question for someone who is an expert on Armenian: Are there examples of words which are pronounced with long consonant clusters? Also, I don't think that the Roman characters used to compose those are worth mentioning, because those digraphs are artificial, anyway (created by switching to an alphabet with fewer characters). This insertion is mentioned in the article on schwas, by the way. BlanketPI ( talk) 23:05, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
The page says the “ts” in “sightscreen” is an affricate /t͡s/, the same as the “zz” in “pizza”. However, this is not true, and in reality, it is a sequence of /t/ and /s/ (sight·screen). English renders a the sequence /ts/ as /t͡s/ only when pluralizing a word ending with /t/, or in compound words containing pluralized words ending with /t/, as in “Pittsburgh”. 125.63.25.18 ( talk) 03:42, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
The article says currently that all such clusters begin with /s/ or /ʃ/, however there is at least one word that isn't like this: croissant /ˈkɹwɑːsɒ̃/ -- 138.246.2.200 ( talk) 11:59, 22 December 2019 (UTC)
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I would like to kno about the noraml acquisition of consonants clusters. What are we supposed to expect at 2 years of age? (English) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.17.139.247 ( talk • contribs) 21:13, 30 November 2004
How is rhythm a six-part consonant cluster? The y is a pronounced as a vowel. The way I hear it, there are two consonant clusters in "rhythm", "rh" and "thm". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bryce ( talk • contribs) 14:18, 15 June 2005
rhythm in english is a 4 (or 5) phoneme, 2 syllable word [rIDm] (sorry, can't remember my SAMPA), there is most definitely a vowel.. [r] [I] [D] and a syllabic [m] (or schwa + m if you subscribe to that line of thinking). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Exit ( talk • contribs) 00:16, 3 July 2005
i'd like to rewite some of this to be less misleading, because for example in slovak, r and l can be vocalic, so a word presented like štvrťžblnknutie may appear to be only 2 syllables (because there are 2 vowel nuclei), but in fact it is 4 syllables long: štvrť.žbln.knu.tie, where the r and the l are syllabic, so why is the word presented as an example of a 'formidable consonant cluster'? each syllable has at most a 3 consonant onset, which is hardly formidable.
also, the statement: the Georgian gvbrdγvnis is an example of this type, containing four syllables, but only one vowel...
what is the syllable breakdown? gv.brd.γv.nis? do not these syllables have a vocalic nucleus? if so, that means 3 of those consonants aren't parts of the clusters.... which according to the syllable breakdown i've written, there aren't any clusters at all if you look at it on a per-syllable basis. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Exit ( talk • contribs) 17:59, 3 July 2005
and the importance of cross-syllable clusters? are there any references for this? i've never heard mention of this before.
Exit 3 July 2005 17:59 (UTC)
i'm a student of tbilisi state university of the faculty of georgian linguistics, and more, i'm georgian and my native language is georgian. that means i can help you to understand and do not leave any doubts about georgian consonant clusters. georgian language is one of the very rear languages (or the only), where everything is read totaly the same way it is written. i mean that every phonem (or just phonetic sound) has only one letter, that expreses it. and any time when this letters are written, there can be read strictly the same. for example a word sheuratsxhk'ops is read /sheuratsxhk'ops/ :-) (there are 4 consonants /ts/, /x/, /h/, /k'/). and there is strictly 4 syllables (she.u.ratsx.hk'ops). and yes, the word /gvbrdghvnis/ is strictly only onesyllabical. if you listen to georgian speaking, or better, georgian poems, where this word is used. you would discover that i'm right. and there is nothing scary about it. caucasian people have very free articulation, and this kind of things is not problem for us. :D
but i'm going to tell you that, there is consonant cluster whith 9 consonants in word /gvprtxlvnis/ (he is making us to be always scary) in georgian. it's a grammatical form of word /prtxla/ (a creature that is always scary). but it's is not an literatural form, that's why no one has written about it yet, but in dialects and slang it exists! and maybe there are moreconsonantic clusters in regional goergian or georgian slang that i can't remember at the moment. (sorry for not knowing english well :), if) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexandro Celabreli ( talk • contribs) 11:53, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
i removed the following lines:
The longest consonant cluster in an English word appears in latchspring. The longest consonant cluster anywhere, eight in total, appears in German Angstschweiss (agony sweat).
Certain loan words, like Nietzschean (supporting philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas), which has five, may have even more.
... latchspring may contain 5 consonants in a row, but only 4 spoken across 2 syllables.. [latS.sprIN]...
same thing with the german Angstschweiss ... sch in german is phonetically 1 consonant [S]
and if we are talking about the english pronunciation of Nietzschean, well, it would be pronounced [nitSi@n]... one consonant for all of 'tzsch' in the middle of the word
also, although czech vlk (wolf) doesnt contain any written vowels, the [l] is vocalic.
Exit 8 July 2005 03:44 (UTC)
That's like saying english word /wrd/ has no vowels.
Or that ancient Hebrew was pronounced with no vowels.
A tiny correction to the above rambling; the longest consonant kluster seems to be in the Swedish word borsjtjschlager, nine in total. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.181.100.127 ( talk) 20:42, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Currently the article defines a consonant cluster thus "a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel." Compare this to the definition given here. "A consonant cluster is a group or sequence of consonants that appear together in a syllable without a vowel between them." (emphasis added). Which is correct? I believe it's the latter. I'm about to edit the article accordingly.
I also noticed the following "Japanese is almost as strict, but it allows clusters of n + consonant: Honshu, the name of one of the major islands of Japan, is an example." Yeah, the major island but ... if we keep in mind the above correct definition, we notice something: these groups of /n/ + consonant are not consonant clusters at all because they cross a syllable boundary. However, this is not to say the consonant clusters cannot occur in Japanese. The language does allow consonant plus /j/ as in Tokyo.
Jimp 04:39, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I hadn't read the bit where the article mentions that there is disagreement over which definition is better. This info had been placed way down towards the bottom, though. I've moved it up into the intro where it belongs. Even so, that Japanese example is still a little off considering that the [n] in Honshu is a syllabic consonant and therefore phonologically a vowel. Jimp 06:12, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
I might be wrong here, but I'm almost entirely sure that "he is plucking us" is actually gvprcʼkvnis in Georgian. I'll try to find out which word is correct and then maybe correct the entry if no one objects or can certify the word in the entry. I think I'm going to include Georgian spelling for this word as well... — N-true 18:12, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
In Polish 4-consonant clusters are also not uncommon (e.g. Strwiąż, wstręt, pstry, wstrzymać, wzgląd, wstrzelić, oszczerstw), 5-consonant clusters also sometimes occur (e.g. źdźbłko). Also, you only show examples of clusters within a single word (although I believe Angstschweiß should be counted as 2 words, which in German can be in many cases joined together). If you counted inter-word clusters, you would find even 9-consonant examples in Polish (e.g. słuchać "oszczerstw z wstrętem", wszedł "Herbst z pstrągami") — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sutashu ( talk • contribs) 08:21, 7 June 2007
"The German word Angstschweiß (cold sweat) is another good example."
Uh... and how would that be? 203.154.48.179 13:53, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
Above, User:Angr mentioned the difference between two distinct consonants put together into a cluster (even if the cluster is bridging two syllables, rather than being contained within a single syllable -- I'll leave that a separate issue!) and an affricate, which is generally percieved and pronounced as a single consonant. Contrary to IPA renderings, the English "CH" or "TCH" is (almost?) never pronounced as a "T" followed by an "SH": The word "chew", for example, isn't pronounced in a way that could be equally well rendered as "tshew"; "why choose" and "white shoose" are not homophones, nor are "catch it" and "cat shit" even though "catch up" and "ketchup" are. While most examples of consonant clusters counting affricates as more than one consonant have been removed from the article, I think it would benefit the article to directly address the subject. One thing in particular that I'd like to see addressed is the fact that if one draws out the "CH" sound, it has a sharp, almost tinnient sound compared to a drawn out "SH" sound, as the "CH" is made with the tip of the tongue (with the supposed "T" sound really being incidental to its pronunciation) and the "SH" is made with a much broader area of the tongue contacting the roof of the mouth further back. To be honest, I can't see why IPA stopped using ligatures for the English "CH" and "J" in favor of two seperate symbols for each, when even the ligatures conveyed the (completely incorrect) idea that the English "CH" and "J" each contain more than a single consonantal sound quality, thus calling for exactly the opposite sort of replacement: losing each of the two ligatures with its own, single, distinct symbol. Why a single character is used in IPA to distinguish a combination of two totally different sounds in the case of [ɲ] (made up of an [n] followed by a very distinct [j]), but two characters are needed for a single sound in both the case of the single sound misleadingly rendered [tʃ] and the single sound misleadingly rendered [dʒ] is absolutely inconcievable. The only reason I could possibly think of for this is that the usual pronunciation of these consonants throughout almost the entire Anglosphere radically differs from mine own native dialect of Cascadian English, in which case there would be unique consonants in Cascadian English not represented at all in the IPA. -- Þórrstejn ˡθoɝ.staɪʲn: Hammer of Thor talk 09:59, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
Different words are different syllables. A very brief pause is inserted between syllables. Plus, "white" is often pronounced using a "held T" or "glottal stop" rather than the Initial T. ANd even if you DO use an aspirated t, there will be a slight pause before "sh". Ticklewickleukulele ( talk) 01:20, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
I've been wondering this for a long time: why do "tr", "dr" appear a lot more often than "tl", "dl" in European languages that I've seen (Germanic and Romance mainly)? "tl" and "dl" appear mostly between syllable boundaries, and are rarely ever present in initial and final positions (excluding the syllable "l" right now), while "tr" and "dr" are common enough regardless of whether the "r" is an alveolar approximant, trill, or even an uvular fricative. Similarly, "sl" is more often than "sr", and "vr", "vl", "zr", "zl" are all quite rare (except for "vr" in French)? What quality governs the probability for a certain cluster to appear and to remain in a language?
Keith Galveston ( talk) 07:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
ALL of the examples in foreign (this is the English wikipedia, remember?) languages, currently do not provide transcription! While readers could be expected to know the consonant composition of a word in the language of the article this is definately not the case for other languages. As user Exit said, spelling is not phonetic transcription. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.130.134.65 ( talk) 00:53, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
This article could probably benefit from some sound bites, to show us how exactly things like "/ɡvbrdɣvnis/" sound when said properly. I just can't concieve this word as one syllable at all. - filelake shoe 17:05, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
As a native speaker of American English, I'm painfully aware that our orthography usually doesn't correspond to the actual pronunciation of the word. It's with this in mind that I propose to modify or replace the sentence regarding "twelfths" and "bursts", as /twɛɫfs/ and /bɺs:/ seem to be more common than /twɛɫfθs/ and /bɺsts/, at least in my experience. It seems to me--again, just personal experience--that speakers are tending towards simplifying consonant clusters, especially in clusters involving /θ/. For example, I've heard <paths> (/pʰæðz/ or /pʰæθs/) turn into something like /pʰætʰ.s/ (/t/ distinct /s/); <tooth's> becomes /t̪utʰ.s/ (same as before); <wolves> becomes something like /wɵʊvz/ instead of /wʊɫvz/, and so on. I just think there should be a note about variant pronunciations that simplify consonant clusters, at least in English. Dargueta ( talk) 00:02, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Unbeknownst to the writer the finnish word hamstrata - to hoard like a hamster breaks the 3 rule. so it is not so 4 is possible — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.113.96.60 ( talk) 22:17, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
Consonant clusters are two or more consonants that make one sound as in sh, th, tch, ph, etc. They differ from blends. In a blend such as spl, the sounds blend together but are distinctly separate as in s-p-l-i-t which has four distinct phonemes. In the word "w-i-tch" there are three separate phonemes because tch makes one sound. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.246.187.30 ( talk) 01:28, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Before making light of Georgian clusters, try beating the 12 consecutive consonants in this everyday sentence: "The rankled dirndls tsked strict schmucks" (/ðə ræŋkld dɜrndlz tskt strɪkt ʃmʌks/) (only spoilsports pronounce "tsk" as /tɪsk/). Afasmit ( talk) 23:21, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
In the section on English clusters, it says that a word can have at most 3 consonant phonemes in its initial cluster, however, doesn't the word "strain" have four ( /stʃɹeɪn/ )? Perhaps I have been saying it wrong, though. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.107.200.110 ( talk) 21:45, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, twelfths only has 4 consonant sounds in its coda. 166.137.244.62 ( talk) 19:38, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Firstly, I am in no way an expert on language, let alone Armenian, of which I don't even know a word. However, I was curious about Armenian consonant clusters, and I found on Wiktionary that there didn't seem to be very many with more than about three consecutive consonants split between syllables (let alone in the same one). Then I came across an online book about the language. Starting on page 30, it mentions schwa insertion for consonant clusters of length greater than two (and sometimes even in those with two!). In fact, looking at the Armenian Wiktionary pages for the mentioned words ( քրթմնջալ and խղճմտանք) yields a pronunciation with the schwas put in (look directly below the IPA pronunciation to see the word with (ը) inserted), and the English page for քրթմնջալ, (the other word doesn't have an English page) shows the schwas inserted in the IPA. I don't think that Armenian should be removed from the page per se, but instead listed as an example of orthography not matching pronunciation. Though that raises the question for someone who is an expert on Armenian: Are there examples of words which are pronounced with long consonant clusters? Also, I don't think that the Roman characters used to compose those are worth mentioning, because those digraphs are artificial, anyway (created by switching to an alphabet with fewer characters). This insertion is mentioned in the article on schwas, by the way. BlanketPI ( talk) 23:05, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
The page says the “ts” in “sightscreen” is an affricate /t͡s/, the same as the “zz” in “pizza”. However, this is not true, and in reality, it is a sequence of /t/ and /s/ (sight·screen). English renders a the sequence /ts/ as /t͡s/ only when pluralizing a word ending with /t/, or in compound words containing pluralized words ending with /t/, as in “Pittsburgh”. 125.63.25.18 ( talk) 03:42, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
The article says currently that all such clusters begin with /s/ or /ʃ/, however there is at least one word that isn't like this: croissant /ˈkɹwɑːsɒ̃/ -- 138.246.2.200 ( talk) 11:59, 22 December 2019 (UTC)