My previous example of phonotactic combination analysis was on data that was, despite a few kinks, still largely homogenous. But to showcase how it’s important to have a decent basic hypothesis before going into more fine-grained analysis, here’s a look at a rather different dataset. These are the medial consonants and consonant clusters from the inherited Proto-Khanty lexicon, again per Honti’s data (words with cognates elsewhere in Uralic but absent from Mansi are not included).

Some notes about notation etc. though, before I go on.

• 1st medial consonants (“C₂”) are listed down. Possible 2nd consonants of a consonant cluster (“C₃”) are listed across.
• I have analyzed PKh *ə as an epenthetic, non-phonemic segment that is inserted in “difficult” consonant clusters in, roughly speaking, stem-final position. E.g. *peLəm ‘lip’ = underlyingly /peLm/. Without this analysis I would be almost comically short on data.
• *g and *x mark two segments that only…