Loanword Adaptation Research Articles

Domains and Prominence in Nasal Harmonization of Maxakalí Loanwords

We examine the patterns of loanword adaptation in Maxakalí, a Macro-Jê language of Brazil, in importing loans from Brazilian Portuguese, with respect to the introduction of nasality and nasal harmony, based on a corpus of 18 speakers. Employing MaxEnt modeling of quantitative trends enabled the comparison and analysis of certain recurrent trends, even if not exceptionless, and the potentially additive effects of their interaction. The results reveal that nasal harmonization, modeled as set of markedness constraints, is greatly enforced within syllable rimes, and strongly enforced within syllables, but shows little role for syllable-to-syllable harmony, demonstrating that harmonization is preferred within tighter prosodic domains. Word-initial consonants always retain their nasality or orality from Portuguese, and stressed vowels always preserve their nasality. These latter effects uphold the role of prominent positions in maintaining contrasts within loanword phonology. The overall patterns of loanword harmonization find convergence with certain characteristics within Maxakalí phonology itself.

Adaptation of Loanwords by Saraiki Speakers

The study presents a basic analysis of loanwords adaptation process by Saraiki speakers. Loanwords from three languages are analyzed and results reveal that native grammar used different strategies for different languages. In one language the onset/initial CC is adapted while in the other the final CC is modified by Saraiki speakers. It is observed that if the loanwords structure is absent in native grammar, it is not adapted though it follows universal principles. Native grammar allows clusters on both initial and final positions but loanwords do not. The study also discloses the strange behaviour for different languages, Saraiki speakers used fix vowel to break the cluster of English loanwords but vowel harmony and gemination in Arabic loanwords. It is noted that loanwords grammar preferred to have CV and CVC syllables rather than clusters at margins. Apart from grammatical adaptation, prosodic structure of receiver is also maintained. In many examples Saraiki follows universal principles but sometimes presents its own way to adapt loanwords

An Optimality Analysis of the Phonology of French Loanwords as Manifested in the Eastern Part of Algeria

The present study sheds lights on the French loanwords which are integrated in the Algerian Spoken Arabic (ASA), particularly the dialect spoken in the Eastern part. It identifies the phonological processes used to adapt them within an Optimality Theory (OT) framework. A thorough scrutiny of the data indicated that the French loanwords underwent a number of adaptations to fit into the phonological system of the Algerian Arabic. Moreover, the results revealed that this nativization process involves a number of phonological processes, namely unpacking of nasal vowels, nasal place assimilation, vowel deletion, front vowel raising, voicing, devoicing and stopping, in addition to lateral assimilation. The application of optimality framework as to explicate the adaptations of French loanwords has shown that they emanate from a steady conflict between the faithfulness constraints, which condition the preservation of original input forms, and the markedness constraints describing the Algerian Arabic marked phonological system.

Semantic adaptations of the Arabic loanwords in the Indonesian language

This paper investigates the adaptation of Arabic loanwords in the Indonesian language semantically. The data were taken from Kamus Basar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) fifth edition. 1,870 words are listed in the KBBI as Arabic loan words. The definitions of these words were compared with their original Arabic definitions found in Almaany Arabic dictionary (2019) to determine the semantic adaptations. The analysis shows that most of the Arabic loanwords in the Indonesian language have retained the same meanings as their originals in the Arabic language. However, there have been semantic adaptations in which eighteen words have been narrowed, nine words have been extended, and seven words have gone through the shifting process. The narrowing was due to absorbing of only one meaning of a word that had many meanings in Arabic , borrowing the old meanings of the words that have been extended recently due to the advent of technology, filling any existing gap or borrowing of new words along with cultural concepts. The extending was due to overgeneralizing some Arabic affixes and forms ,leaving one form of a word to represent the meanings of the others or assigning names to things by the way people perceive them by their five senses . The shifting occurred mainly because of borrowing of new words along with cultural concepts, assigning names to things by the way they are perceived by the five senses or overgeneralizing of forms that occurred in Arabic loanwords.It is hoped that the findings of this study will be useful to researchers interested in semantic adaptation of loanwords.

СТРАТЕГИИ ПРЕОБРАЗОВАНИЯ РУССКИХ ФОНЕТИЧЕСКИХ ЗАИМСТВОВАНИЙ В КИТАЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ: ФОНЕТИЧЕСКИЕ И ГРАФИЧЕСКИЕ АСПЕКТЫ

This article considers phonetic and graphic transformations of Russian loanwords in Chinese. The study comprises an analysis of both proper and common nouns, as well as both loanwords included in dictionaries and those used in the Internet. The data considered make it possible to detect the main trends in the adaptation of Russian consonants in Chinese, as well as to localize the hypothetical influence of the Russian-Chinese pidgin on current loanword adaptation in Mandarin Chinese. It is noted that there is a dramatic discrepancy between the norms of transliteration prescribed by the PRC media and the usage in the Internet. Furthermore, a significant level of specificity of the hieroglyphic N-grams in the loanwords is revealed, compared to the reference corpus of the Chinese texts. The author expects that the results of the work will be useful for specialists both in phonetic typology and in NLP.

АНГЛИЦИЗМЫ В ИСПАНСКОЙ ТЕРМИНОЛОГИИ ИНФОРМАТИКИ И ТЕЛЕКОММУНИКАЦИЙ: УЗУС И КОДИФИКАЦИЯ

The article analyses adaptation of loan words in the Spanish terminology of informatics and telecommunications. The author examines terms-Anglicisms identified in the Spanish National Corpus, considers specificity of their functioning. It is shown that the identified Anglicisms, assimilated and non-assimilated, interact with the Spanish lexemes adapting to syntagmatic structures of the recipient language and form stable combinations, which indicates a high level of their assimilation. Orthographic instability of certain borrowings indicates the dynamic development of informatics and telecommunications terminology and testifies the natural process of Anglicisms assimilation that occurs regardless of regulations of the Royal Spanish Academy.

Semantic Analysis of English Loanwords in Communication on the Social Networking Website Facebook

This paper is concerned with the semantic analysis of Еnglish loanwords at a lexeme level in communication on facebook. This quantitative research was accomplished within the scope of contact linguistics and indirect borrowing with the aim of determining the degree of semantic adaptation of English loanwords in the receiving language. The results show that the majority of lexemes complete the process of integration at the level of primary adaptation (79.03%), owing to the time-consuming nature of secondary adaptation, which demands an integration of loanwords into the receiving language. Due to the fact that loanwords are borrowed in specific contexts and tend to transfer only one aspect of its original meaning into the receiving language, the semantic narrowing is the most frequently found mechanism of primary adaptation (82.44%). The majority of loanwords [170/202] are adapted by narrowing the number of original meanings. The prominence of meaning specification is illustrated by 74.69% of loanwords borrowing only one lexeme meaning or submeaning. On the other hand, 5 mechanisms of secondary adaptation are: widening of semantic field [20/65]; widening of the number of original meanings [17/65]; pejoration [2/65]; ellipsis [25/65] and metaphor [1/65].

Phonological and perceptual factor symbiosis in loanword adaptation

This paper examines the two-way interaction of perceptual and production factors in the light of resolving French and English loan structures in Kirundi. The investigation is framed within the view that loanword adaptation results from attempts to match the non-native perception of the L2 input, within the confines of the L1 grammar. Neither a purely perceptual nor a purely grammatical account can explain the facts. Based on 239 French and 44 English corpora of loans, this study examines loanword adaptation at both the phonemic and the phonotactic levels. We prove how the constraint-ranking Optimality Theory (OT) can account for the phonological adaptations of loans but with limitations. The adaptation cannot be fully understood unless perceptual similarity and auditory factors are integrated in the grammar. This study enriches our understanding of the role of perceptual similarity and perceptual salience in phonology and their relationship to constraint ranking.

한국어 장애음의 영어 차용

The purpose of this study is to investigate the principles for loanword adaptation by analysing the Taekwondo vocabularies and Korean food names borrowed into English. Three results were found from data analysis. Firstly, phonetic realizations of Korean stops and fricatives determine the corresponding loan sounds in English. Such phonetic adaptation reflects how borrowers perceive source sounds. Secondly, the Taekwondo loanwords in English adapted early 1950’s exhibit the preference for phonetic similarity between the source and borrowing sounds. But relatively recently adapted Korean food name loanwords are conditioned by Romanization regulations in Korea. Thirdly, the diachronic change in mapping Korean obstruents to the corresponding loan sounds in English shows that the principles for loanword adaptation can change over time. These results suggest that phonetic similarity is mostly effective in early stage of loanword adaptation(Y. Kang, 2010). They also show that variable loan sounds are regularized by various factors including Romanization system of the source language.

English Loanword Adaptation in Telugu

The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed phonological description of English loanwords in Telugu, a Dravidian language. The data is collected from a native speaker of Telugu. While confirming the loanword data previously reported, the current new empirical data obtained from fieldwork reveals several interesting aspects of loan adaptation. Two main findings of this study are as follows. First, English word-final consonants may or may not be geminated in Telugu to satisfy the stress requirement under the Stress-to-Weight Principle. Second, vowel epenthesis takes place in Telugu to repair dispreferred word-final consonants or consonant clusters in English loanwords, and the quality of the epenthetic vowel is determined by the position in a word, the type of the preceding consonant, or the type of the preceding vowel. It is also shown that the patterns of English loanword adaptation are generally constrained by phonological, phonetic, and orthographic properties of the source English words, as well as the native phonology of Telugu.

Problems of vitality of the Turkic languages in the age of globalisation

In recent years, there is an apparent increase in interest of linguists to do comparative studies on lexicology over the genetic and typologically related languages. This paper has sought to critically research the role of mutual lexical enrichment of kindred languages and assimilation of loanwords, in particular, anglicisms to the vitality, maintenance and revitalisation of Turkic languages in the age of globalisation. The most important reasons for penetration and use of words and terms borrowed from English in modern Turkic languages have extra linguistic nature. However, intra linguistic factors are not an exception. Owing to distinctions of graphic bases of the alphabets and pronunciation norms of Turkic languages, the level of phonetic, grammatical and semantic assimilation of loanwords and terms in these languages are not identical. Because of incomplete phonological and graphic adaptation of loanwords, it becomes clear that in the Turkic languages national colouring, phonetic and orthographic norms of these languages are partly changed.
 Keywords: Vitality, lexical system, Turkic languages, globalisation, anglicisms.

Loanword adaption in Persian: A Core-Periphery model approach

This study discusses the adaptation of loanwords in Persian from donor languages of Arabic, French and English. The main claim is that loanwords adapt to the host language phonology based on the duration of the time they have been used in that language (Kemmer 2017). Thus, I propose that Arabic loans which are borrowed earlier are more nativized than recent loans, like Russian, French and English words. Compared to the former studies (Shademan 2002; Perry 2005, 2011; among others), this is the first account that aims to show the hierarchical and gradual nativization process of loans in Persian by use of Core-Periphery model (Itô and Mester 1999). This model categorizes words from core stratum to periphery stratum based on the satisfaction of constraints in the host language as systematic comparison criteria of older loans with recent ones. In this study I show that the Persian lexicon is stratified into three strata: core, middle and periphery. This lexicon stratification reflects the gradual nativization of loanwords where the core stratum includes frequent native items, the middle stratum includes older loans (Arabic) and the periphery stratum includes recent loans (Russian, French and English). Furthermore, this paper shows that highly frequent Arabic loans satisfying all constraints have become completely nativized and thus are categorized as part of the core showing the great influence of the donor language.

On the Relatinization of the Latin Term 'magister'

The expansion of the linguistic lexicon by means of loanwords is a common phenomenon. During this process the word is taken from the donor language and assimilated in the system of the recipient language. Loanword adaptation is carried out on the semantic and formal level which concerns the pronunciation, spelling and grammatical characteristics of a word in question. In this article we present the case of the Latin word magister concentrating on its phonetic accommodation and process of its relatinization after the original borrowing in the Old Polish language. The word was relatinized in Polish, that is reborrowed from the Latin orthographic form and as such it functions in the Polish lexicon to this very day. Additionally, we investigate the semantic adaptation of the word, describing the relations between the Latin and the Polish meanings of the word magister at different stages of development of both languages.

PARTIAL TRANSPHONEMIZATION OF ENGLISH LOANWORDS IN SERBIAN: ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE FROM THREE VOWELS

Following the principles of lexical borrowing which regulate the phonological adaptation of English loanwords in the Serbian language, we investigate the acoustics of the partial transphonemization of three English vowels. We have employed the Praat software in the acoustic analysis of speech to measure the values of the first three formants and the duration of vowels in accented positions in a sample of English loanwords integrated into Serbian in contrast to the corresponding vowels in English words. First, we contrast the acoustic features of the English vowels /ʌ/, /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ and the Serbian vowels /ɑ/, /i/ and /u/ by measuring the first three formants of the vowels in speech produced by English-Serbian native bilingual speakers. Second, we measure the duration of vowels in pairs of English words and their replicas in Serbian which we labelled ‘false acoustic pairs’ due to the differences in vowel length. The results verify the principle of substitution which governs the integration of loanwords on the phonological level in Serbian as a borrowing language, which requires that borrowed words comply with the phonological system of the language, in which case the phonological adaptation of phonemes of different qualities is partial.

Native and Non-Native Patterns in Conflict: Lexicon vs. Grammar in Loanword Adaptation in Brazilian Portuguese

English loanwords with /ʌ/ that are part of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) lexicon are normally produced with [ɐ] (pub: [ˈpɐbɪ]). Although [ɐ] is the closest segment to /ʌ/ in the native inventory, it is highly constrained in BP: it is an allophone of /a/ that can only appear in nasal contexts. This paper investigates whether native speakers of BP generalize to novel loanwords the adaptation pattern of English /ʌ/ that is present in the BP lexicon. Two experiments were conducted, one with real loanwords and one with nonce loanwords. In the Real Loanword Experiment, participants consistently used [ɐ] both in oral (pub) and nasal contexts (funk), as predicted given the patterns in the lexicon. In the Nonce Loanword Experiment, participants used [ɐ] significantly more frequently in nasal contexts – in oral contexts, the most frequent adaptation was [a]. This reveals that speakers employ their native grammar to filter new loanwords: in contexts where [ɐ] is not licensed, they favor the corresponding licensed form. These results suggest that native speakers do not generalize non-native patterns that are present in the lexicon, mirroring what has been observed for the generalization of unnatural patterns in native grammars (e.g., Garcia 2017; Jarosz 2017).

Vowel Quality Cues to Variable Nasal Adaptation in Mandarin Loanword Phonology

Variation in phonological adaptation has not always been analysed in detail, but some studies on Standard Mandarin (SM) loanword phonology, where a seemingly wide range of variation is present, have started to uncover cases where instances of variable adaptation are contextually conditioned (e.g. Hsieh, Kenstowicz, & Mou, 2009 on SM nasal codas; Lin 2008 on SM vowels). Our study presents corpus and experimental data in which intervocalic English nasals are variably adapted as either geminates or singletons in SM. We argue that the perceived duration and nasalization of the English prenasal vowels condition which variant is preferred in SM, and suggest how these vowel quality cues are processed and mapped onto SM phonological representation by monolingual and bilingual SM speakers. This study contributes to a better understanding of which phonetic cues modulate variation in adapted forms and how they do so. It also showcases multiple sources for variable loanword adaptation: linguistic contexts, auditory vs. non-auditory inputs, and monolingual vs. bilingual differences.

Loanword adaptation in Esperanto

This research investigated the phonological directions by which new roots are incorporated into Esperanto. Words were selected from the following magazines: Kontakto, the official magazine of the Tutmonda Esperantista Junulara Organizo (TEJO – World Esperanto Youth Organization), which was first published in 1963 and has subscribers in over 90 countries, and Esperanto, the official magazine of the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (UEA – Esperanto Universal Association), which was first released in 1905 and has readers in 115 countries, in addition to a technological terminology list (Nevelsteen, 2012) and to words not quoted in dictionaries but published in a list on the blog <http://vortaroblogo.blogspot.com.br/2009/09/nepivajvortoj-i.html>. Words were collected from 13 different languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Japanese, Komi, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Sanskrit and Swahili. The theoretical basis that guided this analysis was Loanword Phonology, mainly the works of Calabrese & Wetzels (2009), Vendelin & Peperkamp (2006), Paradis (1988), Kang (2011), Friesner (2009), Menezes (2013), Chang (2008), Kenstowicz & Suchato (2006) and Roth (1980). An analysis of the corpus showed that words can be adapted by their phonetic form as well as by their root’s orthographic form from the original language. Furthermore, we observed that long vowels were, for the most part, adapted as simple vowels; and some words are present in two synchronic variations.

Consonantal Adaptation of Arabic Loanwords in Kiswahili and Kisukuma: A Phonological Explanation

Based on three lists of well-established Arabic lexical borrowings in Standard Kiswahili and Standard Kisukuma, the study attempts to answer two questions. First, the study explores what consonantal repair strategies are triggered by both Standard Kiswahili and Standard Kisukuma to ensure the conformity of the Arabic consonants with the consonantal inventories of the two borrowing languages. Second, it investigates whether these repair strategies are phonological operations. It was found that nine of the ten consonantal repairs employed by both Standard Kiswahili and Standard Kisukuma are governed by the hypothesis and principles proposed by Paradis and LaCharité (1997, 2001, 2005), that is, the Non-Availability Hypothesis, Category Proximity and Preservation Principles, and the Threshold Principle. These findings lend strong support to the argument that loanword adaptation processes are phonologically motivated. In conclusion, the paper aims to contribute primarily to the research on loanword adaptation in general, and to the literature relevant to the consonantal repair strategies in Standard Kiswahili and Standard Kisukuma, in particular.

A Study on the Adoption and Sinicization of Foreign Words in China : A Focus on the Ways of Loanword Adaptation

A Study on the Adoption and Sinicization of Foreign Words in China : A Focus on the Ways of Loanword Adaptation

Experimentally testing the epenthetic bias in loanword adaptation

In loanword adaptation, epenthesis is the favored way to make non-native sound sequences pronounceable, over other options like deletion or substitution (Paradis and LaCharité, 1997). This epenthetic bias is also apparent at the phonetic level, such as the phonologization of excrescent bursts and vocoids as full vowels (Kang, 2003; Davidson, 2007). It is possible that loanword status in and of itself induces this bias, whether or not the source form of interest would be illicit in the speaker’s native sound system. Weinberger’s (1994) Recoverability Principle suggests that second-language learners prefer to preserve or insert sound material due to less awareness of what may be expendable while retaining word recoverability. The epenthetic bias may therefore hold even for sound sequences available in a speaker’s native language but which they consider to be embedded in a word from a foreign language. The current study tests this prediction. Listeners transcribe nonce words manipulated along a [CCVC]-[CəCVC] continuum in which, crucially, both ends of the continuum are licit in their native language. Surrounding speech is manipulated between two framings of the nonce word as either an unfamiliar word in the native language or a word from a foreign language to test whether the latter framing induces a preference for <CVC…> transcription. This shines light on the phonetic roots of a common phonological pattern and how contextually mediated these are.