Syllable Structure and Consonant Clusters in English and Uzbek

This article compares the phonotactics of English and Uzbek, the level at which the two languages differ most even where their segment inventories overlap. English allows onsets of up to three consonants and codas of up to four, whereas native Uzbek words have simple onsets and a restricted set of coda clusters with falling sonority. The article describes the syllable types of both languages from published sources, classifies clusters by sonority profile, and analyses how each language repairs sequences its system disallows, using a small set of ranked Optimality-Theoretic constraints. Three hypotheses emerge: Uzbek is stricter at the left edge of the syllable than at the right; Uzbek repairs by insertion where English historically repaired by deletion; and the ranking in Uzbek loanwords has shifted toward faithfulness to the source form. The examples are illustrative and not corpus-based, so the hypotheses require testing.