Personally I'm in favour of deleting them, because "I'll randomly let this one morpheme ignore both the normal sound changes and the normal phonotactics" feels sloppy to me, but it's up to you, of course (and I'm not saying I've never done that myself!).Solarius wrote: ↑03 Feb 2024 20:37
The trouble is, I really like -g, especially how weird and cludgy it is after stops or consonant clusters. So I'm thinking of reintroducing it in these environments via analogy. Which option sounds best?
1. Have it be reintroduced by analogy, regardless of the new consonant cluster rules.
2. Have it be reintroduced by analogy, with an epenthetic vowel [ə]. However, /ə/ is a pretty marginal phoneme elsewhere in the language, only appearing in loanwords and as an underspecified offglide in diphthongs (and not for all speakers), so this might be implausible.
3. Let it stay deleted.
But I will say, mind your slashes/brackets there. The epenthetic vowel [@] does not require the phoneme /@/, and may not be an instance of it even if they both exist. You could just say it's phonemically -/g/, with an epenthetic vowel in pronunciation.
A real-world example of this is Irish, where certain word-final clusters are phonetically broken up with schwa, but this isn't considered phonemic (and disappears if a subsequent affix renders the cluster no longer final). Think of the stereotypical Irish accent pronunciation of a word like "film" (as "fillum").