[Lingtyp] To include xenophones or not

Fri Dec 10 04:48:27 UTC 2021

Dear all,

thank you for your replies.
It seems that it is preferable to include xenophones (phonemes that only occur in loanwords) in the database.
For your information, my database will include the following information:

  *   Segmental phoneme inventory
  *   Number of tonemes
  *   Word-initially permitted phonemes
  *   Word-finally permitted phonemes
  *   Minimal/maximal number of onsets
  *   Minimal/maximal number of vowels within a syllable
  *   Maximal number of codas

A distinction will be made between the phonological patterns that occur in native words and those that only occur in loanwords.
(For example, maximal number of onsets in native words versus maximal number of onsets in all words including loanwords)
Again, thanks for your help.

Regards,
Ian
On 7 Dec 2021, 7:29 AM +0900, Daniel Ross <djross3 at gmail.com>, wrote:
I would say that the origin of a phoneme is less important than whether it is established in the grammar. So recent, transparent loan-sounds used in very limited contexts might be excluded, or included in a separate category, compared to more established loans. Maybe the idea of native speakers growing up and learning those sounds would be an approximate barrier for this, so that if there are some sounds, say borrowed hundreds of years ago from French into English, then presumably those are now really part of the English phoneme inventory. This also brings up the issue of inter-speaker variation.

The question of English /ʒ/ is a good one in that regard, because I've observed that some speakers of American English do not seem capable of producing it in initial position as in a French-like pronunciation of the name Jacques, while others can. Similarly, some produce an affricate in final position (garage, etc.). For those that produce it only word-medially, there could be another analysis than a phonemic contrast there, as has been mentioned above.

I've also been puzzled about English /ŋ/, which can be explained in most cases as nasal place assimilation, and historically was followed by a velar stop /g, k/. I've noticed a minority of American English speakers who seem to produce a velar stop after /ŋ/ (as in roughly "think-iŋ-guh" with a soft but detectable release of that last stop-- I assume epenthetic for articulatory reasons rather than etymological, but I don't know if anyone has studied this specifically; I have only some short clips from TV I've shared with my classes to demonstrate it, but not representative or general data for this). Of course there are other English speakers, especially those bilingual in a language where initial velar nasals are permitted phonotactically, for whom /ŋ/ would be a phoneme (e.g. bilingual Vietnamese-English speakers who produce the name Nguyen with an initial velar nasal), and other speakers somewhere in the middle. As with many other areas of linguistic description/analysis, we must be careful about what we mean when we refer to "English" or any other language.

Finally, the main reason I wanted to reply to this, but also why it's taken me several days, is that I wanted to mention a North American language with a specific loan-phoneme, found only in 3 words, I believe, including "candle", but I am still unable to remember which language this was. It may have been any of the many grammars I've looked over for assembling a typological sample (for morphosyntactic features), or it could have been a textbook example somewhere. Maybe someone else will remember this example and be able to share it with the list. I can't remember which phoneme it was either, whether it was /k/ (or /d/ or /l/) from English, or maybe a phoneme from the Spanish or French words for 'candle' (I have a vague feeling it might have been /p/ but now that doesn't really make sense for the most likely loanword sources). So I can't tell you the language or source at the moment but I'm confident it was described in exactly this way, with reference to presenting the phoneme inventory for the language.

Daniel

On Mon, Dec 6, 2021 at 7:32 AM Alexander Rice <ax.h.rice at gmail.com<mailto:ax.h.rice at gmail.com>> wrote:

One way I've seen something like this handled is in Nuckolls et al. 2016 (reference pasted below). In a particular Quechuan language, there is a specific class of words (ideophones) that seemingly have a expanded phonological inventory compared to the rest of the language's lexicon, Nuckolls and co. call it a 'stretching' of the language's phonological inventory. (reference pasted below)

they also mention one xenophone /o/, (from borrowings from Spanish) and refer this as well as the phones unique to ideophones as 'marginal sounds', they include such marginal phones in their tables of the language's vowel and consonant inventories, but mark with them an asterisk to indicate their marginality, or in other words, as distinct from the 'normal' phonological inventory

Nuckolls, J. B., Nielsen, E., Stanley, J. A., & Hopper, R. (2016). The systematic stretching and contracting of ideophonic phonology in Pastaza Quichua. International Journal of American Linguistics, 82(1), 95–116. https://doi.org/10.1086/684425

On Thu, Dec 2, 2021 at 12:50 AM JOO, Ian [Student] <ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk<mailto:ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk>> wrote:
Dear typologists,

I would like to seek your advice on a database I am making.
For my doctoral project, I am compiling a phonological database of 700+ Eurasian languages.
The database includes basic information such as the list of word-finally permitted phonemes, maximal number of onsets in a syllable, etc.
For this database, I would like your opinion on whether to include xenophonic (loanword-phonological) information or not.
For example, should the database include phonemes that are only present in loanwords (such as /x/ in English)?
If the language does not allow codas in native word/ but allow them in loanwords, should that information be allowed as well?
If you were using the database, would you find such information helpful?

Pros of adding the xenophonic information:
The database would be more complete. Some xenophonic features can be very old (such as onset clusters in Tagalog, word-initial /r/ in Japanese, etc.), so in a sense they are "nativized" (although they may be still marked). If I mark the native phonology and the loanword phonology distinctly in my database (e. g. Including /ts/ in French phonology but specifying that it only appears in loanwords), then the user can use the database with or without xenophonic information.

Cons:
The problem of including xenophonic information is that, when considering loanwords, it is difficult to judge what is part of a language's phonology or not.
For example /f/ occurs in very recent Korean loanwords such as /f/ail 'file' or /f/eyispwuk 'Facebook' and it's difficult to say if this is really a part of Korean phonology.
Many minority language speakers are also fluent in their national language (such as Russian or Spanish) and they may pronounce loanwords from the national language in their 'original' pronunciation (such as Tuvan speakers pronouncing Russian loanwords in Russian pronunciation) and it's difficult to say if this means Russian phonology has fully integrated into Tuvan phonology.
So where to divide the line between what is purely foreign and what has been nativized?
On the other hand, distinguishing phonological features that are only present in loanwords from those that are also present in native words is quite straightforward and less controversial (although there is also the problem that we do not always know if a word is a loanword or not).
Lastly, since I've already finished a good part of the database (about 15%), if I want to also include xenophonic information then I would have to go through the whole database again, so there's this practical issue.

So I would appreciate your advice on whether including xenophonic information would be substantially beneficial to you or not, if you were using the database.

From Hong Kong,
Ian
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