Nam, Sunghyun. 2021. The adaptation of English word-initial voiced stops in Korean: A diachronic approach. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 27.1.  3-25.  The  word-initial  voiced  stops  in  English  are  adapted  into  the  two distinctive laryngeal categories of lenis and fortis in Korean (Kang 2008, Oh 2009). The  pattern  is  not  easily  predicted  by  phonological  contexts,  but  a  significant diachronic  change  has  been  reported.  The  proportion  of  fortis  adaptation  has decreased over time (Kang 2008). However, whether adaptation as fortis is still an active process has not been seriously investigated in previous studies. It has been assumed without question that the initial voiced segment in a novel English word can still be adapted new as fortis, and previous studies have treated fortis adaptation as analogous to the native phonological process of word-initial tensification (Oh 2009, Kim 2017). This study challenges this assumption and clarifies whether the fortis adaptation is still active among recent loans. To this end, it diachronically compares the adaptation of each of the 204 most frequent English loans. The results show that the current bifurcation is a mix of older and newer adaptative patterns, where fortis adaptation only exists in the older pattern. In other words, voiced stops in new loanwords are no longer adapted as fortis, and fortis adaptation in the contemporary data is a remnant of the historical pattern. If this analysis is on the right track, the focus should shift towards identifying the factors that facilitate retaining the older fortis forms. This study suggests that the effects of native phonology prohibit them from changing into lenis. 

Keywords: loanwords, diachronic change, laryngeal contrast, tensification, Korean

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