Abstract
In this paper, I present data from three corpora of written Uyghur showing that the conventionally voiceless letter h, which occurs in words of Arab-Persian etymology, sometimes patterns as voiced in stem-final environments where it is a trigger for morphophonemic voicing assimilation in a following segment. Results indicate that when authors omit root-final h from the spelling, they tend to use voiced suffix-initial consonants, but when the h is written there is considerable variation both between and within authors and lexemes. No other phonological or functional factors were identified as being strong predictors of the variation. I interpret this as reflecting a probabilistic process of lenition or deletion of root-final /h/ in the adaptation of these loanwords that has diffused at different rates across the lexicon for different speakers.
Highlights
As corpus resources and statistical modeling techniques have become increasingly available to linguists, research in corpus linguistics has revealed complex multi-factorial interactions that condition variation in matters such as syntax and word choice (e.g., Wulff & Gries 2019, Bresnan et al 2007, Gries & David 2007)
The present study focuses on a single letter in the orthography of Modern Uyghur (ISO 6393 uig; Turkic; China and Central Asia)
The forum corpus contained over 24 million words from over 100,000 posts, but an unknown percentage of the posts were written in languages other than Uyghur
Summary
As corpus resources and statistical modeling techniques have become increasingly available to linguists, research in corpus linguistics has revealed complex multi-factorial interactions that condition variation in matters such as syntax and word choice (e.g., Wulff & Gries 2019, Bresnan et al 2007, Gries & David 2007). The emergence of social media as platforms for written interaction has led to stimulating new developments in sociolinguistic research on language variation in the realm of orthographic practice. Studies in this vein have revealed complex systems of variation. The spelling variants typically reflect aspects of phonetics or phonology, but their use in orthographic practice is conditioned by a wide variety of factors. Eisenstein (2015), for example, finds grammatical, phonological, and demographic factors at play in conditioning English g-deletion (from -ing forms) and -t/-d deletions on Twitter. Community-of-practice approaches have been taken as well, e.g., Iorio (2010) and Stewart et al (2017)
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