/lit/ - Literature

>>20239374
I'm not super educated on linguistics but I was reading The Wheel, The Horse, The Language and the second chapter talks about basically the ideas you're bringing up - specifically that transitioning from sounds made at the back to front of the mouth (and vice verse) is challenging for our tongues and the source of a lot of errors while speaking and linguistic drift over time.

Phonetics gets really complicated fast and there are a lot of other categories of sounds we make (plotives vs nasals, etc.) but the quick & dirty rule I use based on that idea I just call "loose alliteration" where I divide consonants into front mouth (t,n,p,d, b, etc.) vs back mouth (g, m, l, k, etc.) sounds. I consider words starting in vowels to be neutral. I just try to use it as is reasonable with the plot/characters as clarity and character always comes first.

To your point about V -> A transition though I probably should take vowels into account, but I just like the simplicity of my current system and like what it's done for me so I bring it up sometimes in case others get anything out of it too.

>harsh and disjunctive - Sounds better than the converse
Agree and I think it's the "J" transition as you say, some words have exceptionally strongly pronounced mid-word consonants that need to be considered almost as two words in one for flow purposes.