grammatical affixes are used, it allows an eight-consonant cluster: (he's plucking us), (you peel us). Consonants cannot appear as syllable nuclei in Georgian, so this syllable is analysed as CCCCCCCCVC. Many Slavic languages may manifest almost as formidable numbers of consecutive consonants, such as in the Slovak words ("quarter"), and ("clunk"; "flop") and the Slovene word ("welfare"). However, the liquid consonants and can form syllable nuclei in West and South Slavic languages and behave phonologically as vowels in this case. An example of a true initial cluster is the Polish word ( ("you will initiate"). In the Serbo-Croatian word ("victualling") the and are digraphs representing single consonants: and , respectively. In Dutch, clusters of six or even seven consonants are possible (e.g. ("a scream of fear"), ("writing the worst") and ("treading the most softly")). Some Salishan languages exhibit long words with no vowels at all, such as the Nuxálk word : he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant. It is extremely difficult to accurately classify which of these consonants may be acting as the syllable nucleus, and these languages challenge classical notions of exactly what constitutes a syllable. The same problem is encountered in the Northern Berber languages. There has been a trend to reduce and simplify consonant clusters in East Asian languages, such as Chinese and Vietnamese. Old Chinese was known to contain additional medials such as and/or , which yielded retroflexion in Middle Chinese and today's Mandarin Chinese. The word , read in Mandarin and in Cantonese, is reconstructed as *klong or *krung in Old Chinese by Sinologists like Zhengzhang Shangfang, William H. Baxter, and Laurent Sagart. Additionally, initial clusters such as "tk" and "sn" were analysed in recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, and some were developed as palatalised sibilants. Another element of consonant clusters in Old Chinese was analysed in coda and post-coda position. Some "departing tone" syllables have cognates in the "entering tone" syllables, which feature a -p, -t, -k in Middle Chinese and Southern Chinese varieties. The departing tone was analysed to feature a post-coda sibilant, "s". Clusters of -ps, -ts, -ks, were then formed at the end of syllables. These clusters eventually collapsed into "-ts" or "-s", before disappearing altogether, leaving elements of diphthongisation in more modern varieties. Old Vietnamese also had a rich inventory of initial clusters, but these were slowly merged with plain initials during Middle Vietnamese, and some have