• Fleppensteyn@feddit.nl
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    4 months ago

    The languages I’m most familiar with are quite closely related to English, so I don’t think that’s really the case.

    Actually, one thing I can think of is that English trends to aspirate initial stops, which probably makes those clusters harder to pronounce

    • hakase@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Unless you’re talking about Scots, the closest languages to English are separated by at minimum more than a thousand years, which is plenty of time for those constraints to change significantly.

      I’d even expect different dialects of English to behave differently when adapting loanwords, because they already show plenty of phonotactic differentiation.