thy thigh etc.

[Ante Aikio]

On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Leo A. Connolly wrote:

>  Of course, it's too early to say whether /x-/ and /ç-/ will become
> established in German, but the process seems to have begun.

I don't think that the fact that some speakers "correctly" pronounce
phonemes alien to the language in loan words implies that these phonemes
would be in the process of being established in the language. People have
always tried to mimic foreign pronunciation in loan words whenever it is
considered fashionable. But give it a couple of hundred years and the
words often become nativized. Not always, of course; foreign phonemes and
phonotactic patterns are sometimes introduced through loan words.

Consider the following. Present day colloquial Finnish is swarming with
english loan words, and words and expressions like "about" (in the meaning
'approximately'), "anyway", "fuck it", "shit", "come on", "all right",
etc. show very high frequency in young people's speech. Often the english
words and expressions are pronounced with full English phonology and
phonotaxis, with no nativization at all. Should we then say that in
Finnish a process has begun through which *ALL* the English phonemes alien
to Finnish may become established in the language? This would be bizarre,
because a Finnish teenager who injects English discourse particles in
every sentence he says, knows that these words are not Finnish (that's why
he chose to use them in the first place). The same person can equally well
pronounce /piolokia/ for 'biology' in some other connection.

In historical linguistics, when we uncover prehistoric loan word layers
through etymological research (such as, say, the numerous Proto-Germanic
loans in Proto-Finnic), we usually find very neat substitution patterns
for foreign sounds (e.g. *x- > *k-, as in PG *xanan- > PF *kana 'hen').
One almost gets the impression that 2,000 years ago people just were in
general unwilling to try to pronounce foreign sounds "correctly". But
observations from present-day borrowing reveal that the process was, in
all probability, quite different. I'm sure that there have been many
speakers of Proto-Finnic who have tried to mimic the pronounciation of /x/
- it was, after all, a high-frequency phoneme in a prestige language from
which they borrowed more than 500 words (probably a lot more, actually;
these survive to the present day). But probably after a while they just
got bored with straining their tongues trying to say [xana] every time
they were talking about hens, and started saying [kana] instead.

Regards,
Ante Aikio