[Lingtyp] Avoidance of rare phonemes in loanwords

JOO, Ian [Student] ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk
Wed Oct 14 10:36:02 UTC 2020


Dear all,

I would like to know if there are attested cases like the following:

A language has phoneme A and phoneme B. A and B are phonologically similar. Although A occurs natively in that language, it occurs only rarely, whereas B occurs commonly. When borrowing words that has A, the language replaces A by B, because of the rarity of A compared to B.

I would greatly appreciate your help.

>From Hong Kong,
Ian
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