[Lingtyp] Consonant v. Vowel correspondences in loanwords

[Sandra Auderset]

Hi Ian,

As with your earlier question, it seems that this would very much depend on the phoneme inventories (and actual phonetic realizations of theses phonemes) of the languages in question.

In the Japanese/English example you give, there seems to be a more or less straightforward mapping between the consonants, but not the vowels, because there are many more vowels in English than Japanese and only 3 of the 5 Japanese vowels also appear in the English inventory (based on Kaneko 2006). But if you had a language with the opposite case (i.e. similar vowel inventory, radically different consonant inventory) wouldn’t you expect the reverse, i.e. vowels being borrowed in a more consistent way?

To answer your question, I think one would have to quantify first in some way how similar the consonant and vowel inventories are between the source and target language. Then one could compare results like that of Kaneko 2006 with this similarity measure as a baseline.
I’m curious to see if someone has already carried out such a study, since I think developing such a measure of similarity is not a trivial task in the first place (cf. Eitan Grossman et.al.’s talk at SLE 2019 https://www.academia.edu/41805315/The_typology_of_phonological_segment_borrowing, which addresses related questions).


Best,
Sandra



Sandra Auderset
PhD Candidate
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
MPI for the Science of Human History, Jena (Germany)
&
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)
website





On Feb 6, 2020, 15:38 +0100, joo at shh.mpg.de, wrote:
> 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).
> 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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