Today I Learnt... What Phonotactics is.

Phonotactics refers to the sounds that are allowed to appear together in a syllable in a specific language: Notice that phonotactics refers to sounds rather than spelling. Indeed, it affects spelling, but only indirectly. Take a weird word like "chthonic". The initial consonant cluster makes the word look foreign to most native English-speakers. However, the standard pronunciation /θonik/ (i.e. with the ch silent) sounds perfectly English. Another example from Greek could be pterosaur; English would never pronounce /pt/at the beggining of a word but, as the "p" is silent, /'terəso/ sounds like a normal English word. By contrast, Russian words can start with the consonant cluster /zv/, but this violates English phonetics because in English words cannot begin with /z/ + another consonant sound.