Abstract
This article examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Berber. In loanwords borrowed from French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Berber has phonemic /ʁ/ and /χ/. It is argued that this phenomenon is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors. It is shown that Tashlhiyt Berber speakers, including monolinguals, are able to identify the French r as a sonorant, based on their native phonology, where many co-occurrence restrictions are analyzed in terms of sonority-sensitive dependency relations between the most sonorous segment and its neighboring segments.
Highlights
Many studies have attempted to establish unity in the phonological behaviour of rhotic consonants, despite their high phonetic variability
The French rhotic can be realized as a uvular fricative [ʁ], phonologically, it behaves as a coronal sonorant, which patterns with /l/ in complex onsets
4 Conclusion In this paper, it has been argued that the adaptation of the French rhotic into Berber is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors
Summary
Many studies have attempted to establish unity in the phonological behaviour of rhotic consonants, despite their high phonetic variability. In a recent study on the adaptation of French vowels into Moroccan Arabic, Kenstowicz & Louriz (2009) argue that the process whereby French back, mid, and low vowels introduce pharyngealization ( termed “emphasis”) to adjacent coronal consonants is better analyzed in terms of auditory salience and similarity rather than as contrastive phonological features of the borrowing language (cf Zellou 2011 for an alternative view on this topic). It has been claimed that bilingual speakers play a central role in the adaptation of loanwords, as they have access to the phonological representations of both source and borrowing languages In this regard, Paradis & LaCharité (2001: 272) contend that “bilingual Arabic speakers who adapt French loanwords classify the French rhotic as coronal, despite the fact that Arabic has a phonemic uvular /ʁ/ in its inventory of gutturals.”. Relying on previous work on the structure of verbal roots in Berber (Lahrouchi 2009; 2010), I will show that Berber phonology provides speakers with enough evidence to analyze the French rhotic as a sonorant
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