2021.05.13 22:11
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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