Micamo wrote:
QuantumWraith wrote:
Which language has the largest consonant cluster inventory? Or what is a plausible, maximal consonant cluster inventory?
That would be !Xoon.ǃXóõ (or however it's supposed to be spelt) is (one of?) the languages with the biggest
consonant inventory, yes.
As for consonant
clusters, that depends what you mean.
Bella Coola famously has long grammatical complete sentences with many consonants and no vowels.
If you want "biggest consonant cluster in a word", I don't know, but I bet it's either one of those above or one of those mentioned below.
If you want "biggest consonant cluster in a syllable", it's probably a European language; English and German are both good candidates. One allows 4-consonant onsets and 3-consonant codas; the other allows 3-consonant onsets and 4-consonant coda
* clusters. Technically, I suppose, they both allow 7-consonant clusters in a word (but a syllable boundary has to occur within such a long consonant cluster).
Edit: *I left the word "coda" out.
Nobody speaks of "consonant cluster inventories". There are inventories of consonant phonemes; and there are clusters of consonant phonemes. People talk about those, but not about inventories of clusters of phonemes.
IMO the longest plausible syllable-onset-cluster and the longest plausible syllable-coda-cluster are both 4 consonants long; and IMO the longest plausible consonant cluster in a word is 7 consonants long. But, I believe some conlangers think 5-consonant onset-clusters and 5-consonant coda-clusters are (maybe only barely?) plausible; and if a 'lang had both, it could conceivably have 10-consonant clusters inside a word.
You should know, though, that 3-or-more-consonant onset-clusters and 3-or-more-consonant coda-clusters both co-occurring in the same language is a distinctly minority phenomenon; there are few such natlangs.