[Lingtyp] Consonant v. Vowel correspondences in loanwords

[Hartmut Haberland]

Dear Ian
As to the Japanese example, one has to consider that while Japanese vowels do not have obvious allophonic variants (maybe except for unvoiced i̥ and ɯ̥), consonants have a number of allophonic variants depending on the following vowel:
/h/ {xa, çi, ɸɯ, he, ho}
/t/ {ta, tɕi, tsɯ, te, to}
/s/ {sa, ɕi, sɯ, se, so}
Some phoneme combination do not exist, like ɕa, ɕi, tɕɯ, ɕo but not ɕe.
Already Bloch stated in 1950 that the adaption of English loans (unlike the earlier, at that time much more massive of Dutch and German ones, cf. ko:çi: < Dutch koffie) led to new phonemes like /ɸ/ or /​d̠͡ʑ/ (like in firumu ‘film’ and jetto ‘jet’) which earlier only had been allophonic variants before certain vowels  (Bernard Bloch 1950. Studies in colloquial Japanese. Part 4: Phonemics. Language 26: 86-125).
Still, Japanese does not distinguish v and b or r and l, which means that the loan raba: can both mean ‘lover’ and ‘rubber’.
German has several phonemes that only occur in loans:
/x/: [x] is otherwise only is an allophone of /x/ after back vowels but appears word-initially in words like Junta and place names like Jerez.
Both /​ʒ/ and /d​ʒ/ occur only in loans from French (Genie) and English (Dschungel), resp., but as voiced counterparts of /​ʃ/ and /t​ʃ/ there is a place for them ‘prepared’ in the system.
German has adapted nasal vowels from French in loans but many speakers tend to replace them with Vŋ (in the case of a͂, ε͂ and ɔ͂: aŋ, εŋ and ɔŋ in Chance, Bassin, Balkon) or V:m (in the case of œ͂: y:m as in Parfum).
Hartmut
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Sendt: 6. februar 2020 15:38
Til: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Emne: [Lingtyp] Consonant v. Vowel correspondences in loanwords

Dear all,

Thank you for replying to my earlier question regarding the rarity of certain phonemes in loanwords. All the comments were very helpful.
May I ask another question: I would like to know whether in loanwords, consonants correspond more regularly(consistently) to the source consonants than vowels do to the source vowels.
For example, in English loanwords in Japanese, the consonants correspond correspond more or less regularly (systematically) to their English counterparts. English /p t k m n ng/ all correspond to Japanese /p t k m n Ngu/ respectively, with only a few exceptions.
But for vowels, the correspondence is less consistent: English /æ/ sometimes corresponds to Japanese /a/ and sometimes to Japanese /e/ (Kaneko 2006<https://langsci.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1012/2019/05/kaneko.pdf>).
I wonder if this can be generalized to state that, in source-loan relationship, consonant correspondences are generally more consistent than vowel correspondences.
I would appreciate any opinion on this.


Regards,
Ian
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