Cenyani Consonants

This document details the permitted consonant clusters of the Cenyani language. For more information on the Cenyani language, see its corresponding grammar documentation, especially the page on the Cenyani alphabet and pronunciation.

This document shall be considered an appendix to the grammar documentation.

In the tables below, the cells which have been marked with red colour represent clusters with an irregular pronunciation; and those with a bold font represent consonants or consonant clusters which can be lengthened.

Some general patterns can be observed:

• y [j] must always be adjacent to a vowel. (The tabular data below is in this case is slightly incomplete: while it may seem that y [j] may be placed between syllabic consonants, that, in fact, is prohibited.)
• Dental and alveolar plosives are almost never followed by other dental or alveolar sounds, [s] excluded; and [r] never follows a dental or alveolar consonant. For example, a cenyi would have severe difficulty pronouncing “Kilroy”, and would probably end up turning it into Ciroy [ˈkiroj]
• A nasal followed by a fricative usually has a short, almost unpronounced plosive inserted between the two consonants, whose voicing is the same as that of the fricative and whose place of articulation is the same as that of the nasal. The cenya call this phenomenon a “transition consonant”.
• Plosives and fricatives which are adjacent must have the same voicing. [ʀ], while technically a trill, behaves as a fricative in this regard. The pair dš could be seen as an exception to this rule, but isn’t technically one, as it is pronounced [ʤ].
• [θ] only ever appears next to [s] and [ʃ].

The pronunciation of h as [x] in medial position is mainly dialectal.