There are a handful of English words with 6 consonants in a row. catchphrase and latchstring are probably the most well-known. There's also borschts, which has 6 consonants in a row, and all in the same syllable. Dubious is the word crwths, 6 letters in total and no obvious vowel. But in this original Welsh word, the w acts as a vowel. The ENABLE list, a freely available list of English words used by many on-line game sites, also lists tsktsks, a 7 letter word consisting of nothing but consonants. | [reply] |
There are a handful of English words with 6 consonants in a row. catchphrase and latchstring are probably the most well-known.
That's totally cheating! The "ch" is a single consonant sound; it just doesn't have a decent latin symbol to represent it. Similarly with "ph".
It's just not the same as slovakian languages, where they do effortlessly prononounce strings of consonants. Most English speakers can't say "ts", "kn", or a lot of other sounds that other languages have.
English does have loan words, but using Russian and Welsh is cheating; they're not even in the same language family!
"Tsk, tsk" isn't one 'word', it's two, and it's just a written form of a disaproving click of the tongue.
If you allow loan words freely, in the language I just invented on the spot, the word 'xplqrznvwrglp' has *no* vowels! Are we to call that 'English', too?
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