Nonesuch phonemes in loanwords
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Holly J. Kennard
und
Aditi Lahiri
Abstract
Loanwords may or may not affect the phonological system of a language. Much of the loanword literature has focused on the adaptation of “foreign” contrasts to native systems; however, there are certain cases where languages appear to have borrowed new phonemes. We argue that loanwords alone cannot introduce a new phoneme into a language unless there are special circumstances. We examine three case studies of apparently borrowed “unusual” phonemic contrasts: Swiss German initial geminates, Bengali retroflex stops, and English voiced fricatives. In each case, we find that rather than the loanwords introducing brand-new phonemes, an existing allophonic alternation has become phonemic due to a large influx of loanwords. Thus, the phonology rather than the phonetics alone – marked or otherwise – dominates the absorption of loans.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank two anonymous Linguistics reviewers for their detailed and invaluable comments on previous versions of this article. Earlier analyses and discussion of the material were presented at the Second Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology (Edinburgh, 2015) and the International Conference of Historical Linguistics (Naples, 2015), and we are very grateful to the participants for their feedback. This work was supported by the European Research Council (WORDS Grant FP7-IST-269670, PI Lahiri; MORPHON Grant 695481, PI Lahiri). We would also like to thank the British Academy for the Postdoctoral Fellowship held by Holly Kennard.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Spirantization in Spanish: The role of the underlying representation
- Variation is information: Analyses of variation across items, participants, time, and methods in metalinguistic judgment data
- Nonesuch phonemes in loanwords
- Pivots of the Caribbean? Low-back vowels in eastern Caribbean English
- Formal variation in incorporation: A typological study and a unified approach
- From inquisitive disjunction to nonveridical equilibrium: Modalized questions in Korean
- Foregrounding of subordinate clauses by word order: Psycholinguistic evidence of the function of V>Adv (V2) word order in Danish
- Emphatic consonants beyond Arabic: The emergence and proliferation of uvular-pharyngeal emphasis in Kumzari
- Notice from the Board of Editors
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Spirantization in Spanish: The role of the underlying representation
- Variation is information: Analyses of variation across items, participants, time, and methods in metalinguistic judgment data
- Nonesuch phonemes in loanwords
- Pivots of the Caribbean? Low-back vowels in eastern Caribbean English
- Formal variation in incorporation: A typological study and a unified approach
- From inquisitive disjunction to nonveridical equilibrium: Modalized questions in Korean
- Foregrounding of subordinate clauses by word order: Psycholinguistic evidence of the function of V>Adv (V2) word order in Danish
- Emphatic consonants beyond Arabic: The emergence and proliferation of uvular-pharyngeal emphasis in Kumzari
- Notice from the Board of Editors
