Loanword Phonology and Enhancement

With the development of a “constraints and repair” approach to phonological computation, the field has seen a renewed interest in loanword adaptation. The task of the adapter is to make the loan conform to the segmental, phonotactic, and prosodic structure of the recipient (L1) language while preserving as much information as possible from the donor (L2) language. The balance between these often conflicting demands is insightfully expressed by a constraint-based model of phonology such as Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004) with its key notions of markedness and faithfulness constraints

Loanword phonology in Jahai

Jahai, a language belonging to the Northern Aslian subgroup of the Aslian branch of Austroasiatic, is spoken by a community of approximately one thousand individuals in remote parts of Perak and Kelantan, Peninsular Malaysia, and reportedly also by a small community in the adjacent part of southernmost Thailand. Jahai speakers have long been in frequent contact with speakers of neighbouring languages, notably Temiar, a Central Aslian language, and Malay, the Austronesian majority language. Malay in particular has been an important source of borrowing, and a considerable portion of the Jahai vocabulary is of Malay origin. The present article describes the phonological changes that these words undergo when borrowed into Jahai1

English Loanwords in Ewe: A Phonological Analysis

This paper examines the processes that words borrowed from English go through on the phonological level in their adaptation into Ewe - a Kwa language spoken in Ghana and Togo. The paper analyses the adaptation of English loanwords into Ewe at the level of phonemic adaptation, syllable structure adaptation and the adaptation of stress. In terms of phonemic adaptation, it was found out that certain sounds in the English words borrowed into Ewe are foreign to the speakers of Ewe. In the adaptation process, the speakers replace the foreign sounds with native ones which are acoustically closer to the foreign ones. The analysis reveals that two main operations: deletion and insertion are used to compel foreign syllable structures to conform to the phonotactic constraints of Ewe.  For the adaptation of stress into Ewe, it was realized that stressed syllables in English are generally realized as high tones and unstressed syllables are realized as low tones. The conclusion of this study is that English phonemes are mapped onto Ewe phonetic forms but phonotactic constraints that exist in Ewe result in the processes of deletion and insertion of segments into some English words borrowed into Ewe. Key words: syllable structure, nativization, loanwords, phonotactic constraint

Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception

We show that loanword adaptation can be understood entirely in terms of phonological and phonetic comprehension and production mechanisms in the first language. We provide explicit accounts of several loanword adaptation phenomena (in Korean) in terms of an Optimality-Theoretic grammar model with the same three levels of representation that are needed to describe L1 phonology: the underlying form, the phonological surface form, and the auditory-phonetic form. The model is bidirectional, i.e., the same constraints and rankings are used by the listener and by the speaker. These constraints and rankings are the same for L1 processing and loanword adaptation

IsiZulu adoptives from english and afrikaans: an optimality theory analysis

A thesis submitted to the University of the Witwatersrand in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics. 11 March 2016The study examines some phonological characteristics of isiZulu adoptives, derived from English and Afrikaans. IsiZulu is a member of the Nguni group of languages, whereas English and Afrikaans are linguistically related, belonging to the Indo-European language group. These languages have different phonological structures and borrow words from each other. This research focuses on the repair strategies employed in isiZulu to adapt and rephonologise English and Afrikaans loanwords. Rephonologisation is a process that alters the structure of a word to conform to the phonological structure of a recipient language. This investigation focuses on the segmental and syllable structure modifications that loanwords undergo in order to make them fit into the preferred phonological structure of isiZulu. Particular repair strategies described and accounted for in this study include, inter alia, segment substitution, vowel epenthesis, glide epenthesis, and segment deletion. Certain isiZulu adoptives are completely rephonologised while others only undergo partial adjustment. This indicates the retention, in certain instances, of English and Afrikaans segmental features and syllable structures within isiZulu loanword phonology. This study examines both variants, the fully and the partially rephonologised adoptives. Additionally, with the objective of contributing to phonological typology, the research evaluates and compares its findings to observations made by prior, similar investigations for chiShona (Kadenge, 2012; Kadenge & Mudzingwa 2012) and isiNdebele (Mahlangu, 2007; Skhosana, 2009). The broader objective of this study is to explore the synchronic phonology of isiZulu, exposing the phonological changes that are taking place in this language due to contact with English and Afrikaans. In addition, a vast corpus of isiZulu loanwords (data) from English and Afrikaans is presented; contributing a foundation for utilisation in future studies. The overall analysis of the data is couched within Optimality Theory (OT: Prince & Smolensky 2004), which emphasises that surface forms of language reflect the resolution of conflicts between constraints (Kager, 1999). The intra-linguistic variations of loanwords are explained in terms of constraint re-ranking, which is responsible for the phonological shape of loanwords in isiZulu and is addressed herein