Abstract
Phonological processes are at the heart of linguistic borrowing as it has varied phonological systems. It could be seen that the loan words entering the loan language from the source language can hardly be separated from the phonological process because they must be modified to suit the phonology of the loan language. This article analysed the phonological processes realized in Ekegusii borrowing from English using Optimality Theory’s constraint approach. Since this was a phonological study, descriptive linguistic fieldwork was used. The data used in this article was extracted from Mose’s doctoral study, whereby purposive sampling was used to obtain two hundred borrowed segments from the Ekegusii dictionary, then supplemented by introspection. Further, three adult native proficient Ekegusii speakers who were neither too young nor too old and had all their teeth were purposively sampled. The two hundred tokens were then subjected to the sampled speakers through interviews to realize the sound patterns in the Ekegusii borrowing process overtly. The findings revealed that Ekegusii phonological constraints defined the well-formedness of the loanwords by repairing the illicit structures. To fix, various phonological processes were realized. They included: epenthesis, deletion, devoicing/strengthening, voicing/ weakening, re-syllabification, substitution, monophthongization, and lenition. The article concludes that borrowing across languages (related or unrelated) reports similar if not the same phonological processes only that the processes attested in one language are a subset of the universally exhibited phonological processes.
Highlights
Loanword adaptation is primarily a phonological process; the donor words undergo phonological repairs to adapt to the recipient's segmental, phonotactic, and supra-segmental constraints (Tsvetkov & Dyer, 2016)
The article examined the phonological processes in Ekegusii borrowing from English
It can be concluded that various phonological processes were realised because the languages differ in their phonologies
Summary
Loanword adaptation is primarily a phonological process; the donor words undergo phonological repairs to adapt to the recipient's segmental, phonotactic, and supra-segmental constraints (Tsvetkov & Dyer, 2016). Loanword phonology reveals adaptations employed by native speakers who possess a phonological system to perceive and produce forms that belong to another phonological system (Sarkar, 2012). Because this process is entirely phonological, the loanwords entering a borrowing language from a source language undergo structure modification to conform to the borrowing language’s phonological constraints. When languages borrow from each other, the structure modification of the loanwords may occur to individual segments or at the syllabic level This ensures that strings that break the syllable structure or other phonotactics in the borrowing language are disallowed (Gussenhoven & Jacobs, 2005). The phonological processes realized are either at the segmental or syllabic levels
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