Which, if any, of the world's languages have both the following features?
- Syllable-initial vowels are disallowed; all syllables must begin with a consonant.
- There is no glottal stop phoneme.
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2 Answers
As reported by Lin (1977) (Phonology 14:403-436), there is no glottal stop and no initial vowels in Piro. If you can get Thargari Phonology and Morphology (T. Klokeid 1969, Pac. Ling. Series B #12), you can confirm or deny whether that too is an example.
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So the language is Thargari? You might want to make that more clear in your first sentence. Doing a google search came up with this link which supports that all syllables in Thargary have an onset: books.google.com/… Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 5:38
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1I have the publication by Terry Klokeid and can confirm that Tharrkari (the spelling preferred by the people) syllables are all C initial. Also, it does not have glottal stop (few languages do in Western Australia). Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 14:06
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But I'm sure there are plenty of other languages that require C initial syllables and don't have glottal stop, probably many such in Australia. Commented Jun 27, 2015 at 14:07
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I wonder if it has homorganic glide + vowel syllables though, like /ji/ and /wu/. Those seem to occur in Dyirbal, another Australian language that is said to have no syllable-initial vowels. Commented Feb 20, 2018 at 5:57
There's an Australian language Lardil that has both of the features the OP is asking for:
- there's no phonemic glottal stop, in fact, there are no glottal consonants
- each syllable starts with a consonant (there may be exceptions, but I don't think there are any in Lardil)
answered May 22, 2021 at 20:08
