A Comparative Study on English and Indonesian Consonant Clusters

ABSTRACT

      Nowadays, people in this world not only can speak one language but also can speak more than one language, for example they can speak both English and Indonesian. Therefore English as the international language has taken a part as an important role. Each language has its characteristic consonants and vowel arrangements such as CV, VC, CVC, CCV, VCC, etc. Language differs from each other in their ways of forming a cluster. Consonant cluster is a combination of two or more consonantal phonemes which belong to one syllable. Two languages may have the same consonants, but each has its own rule to form a cluster. Two languages may have the same consonants, but each has its own rule to form a cluster. Indonesian and English, for instance, have the phonemes /p/, /s/, /l/. English allows the cluster /spl/ as in the words split and splash. On the contrary, Indonesian does not have the word which begins with /spl/. English also allows the phonemes /ktst/ occurring at end of a word as in the word texts, but in Indonesia it does not occur.

    This undergraduate thesis has three problems. The first is what the permissible English consonant clusters are. The second is what the permissible Indonesian consonant clusters are, after that the third problem is what the similarities and differences between English and Indonesian consonant clusters are.

       In order to analyze those three problems, the researcher applied the method of contrastive analysis. First both English and Indonesian data were collected, and grouped into the several groups based on the kinds of consonant clusters. Then the researcher analyzed the feature of the data collected. The result of this research can be drawn from the comparison of English and Indonesian consonant clusters. The researcher compares the ways of forming cluster to find the similarities and the differences of English and Indonesian consonant clusters. Indonesian consonant clusters have a simpler system than English consonant clusters. Indonesian only has two-consonant clusters in the final position or we can call it coda clusters, but English has three or even four coda clusters. For the consonant clusters in initial position or we called it as onset clusters, Indonesian has the same system as English cluster. Both Indonesian and English have three onset clusters. Indonesian has three onset clusters for example in the word skripsi and English also has three onset clusters for example in the word scream. Indonesian does not have bound morpheme in its clustering system, but English has it. For example in the word texts, the word textscontains free morpheme text combine with plural –sso it becomes bound morpheme texts.