Guttural deletion in loanwords

Abstract

Among 4,499 segmental malformations found in English loanwords in three large corpora of French, the laryngeal \h\ is the only segment that is never adapted, i.e. replaced by another segment. We suggest that the systematic deletion of \h\ in French follows from the fact that, phonologically, French, like Portuguese and Italian, does not employ the Pharyngeal node, the articulator that characterises gutturals. This prevents English \h\ from being handled phonologically (deleted or substituted) in those languages. The non-availability of the Pharyngeal node also explains systematic deletion of the pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Arabic loanwords in French. In contrast, English \h\ is adapted by languages employing the Pharyngeal node phonologically, such as Spanish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Mandarin Chinese, Greek and Russian. Likewise, the availability of the Pharyngeal node in Fula and English allows the adaptation of Arabic pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Fula, and non-glottal gutturals in English.* We would like to thank the editors of Phonology and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments in connection with the preparation of this article. We also benefited from the comments and questions of Ahmed Alioua, Jacques Durand, Ali Idrissi, Michael Kenstowicz, Pierre Martin, Jean-Franc: ois Prunet and Charles Ulrich on previous versions of this article. Ahmed Alioua, a phonetician from Safi (Morocco), and Nadir Kerris, from Setif (Algeria), checked the Arabic pronunciation of our Arabic loans in French, while Abdulhamid H. Gadoua, a PhD student in phonology who was born in Libya, verified the Arabic pronunciation of our Arabic loans in English. We are particularly indebted to Fre! de! rick Brault, one of our research assistants, for having collected the loanwords of the list appended to this article, checked them with native speaker consultants of European Spanish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Mandarin Chinese, Greek, Russian, Italian and Portuguese, and for having taped, transcribed and computerised them. F. Brault also presented with C. Paradis a preliminary French version of this article at the annual meeting of ACFAS in 1998, and published that version with C. Paradis and D. LaCharite! in 1999. We are also extremely grateful to Fatim El Fenne for her transcriptions of Moroccan and Classical Arabic, and for the time she devoted to the collection of Arabic borrowings in French. We are indebted to Abdourahmane Sakho for his help with the pronunciation of Arabic borrowings in Mauritanian Fula and to our colleagues Ferna4 o Perestrello and Alexander Sadetsky for their help with Portuguese and Russian, respectively. Thank you also to our MA student E; lyse Bolduc for having processed her English loans in Mexican Spanish earlier than expected in order to provide us with statistics rapidly. More generally, we would like to thank all of our consultants and research assistants for their precious collaboration, and the people who kindly answered our questions on the Linguist List. Naturally, we are solely responsible...

The phonology and micro-typology of Arabic R

“…The last pattern comes from loanword phonology, and is exclusive to MCA. In French loanwords borrowed into MCA, the French rhotic /ʁ/ is systematically interpreted as an alveolar tap /r, rˤ/ (5a), despite the fact that MCA has a phonetically equivalent velaruvular fricative phoneme /ʁ/ (Paradis & LaCharité 2001;Lahrouchi 2018). Meanwhile, when Arabic words containing /ʁ/ are borrowed into French, they do not appear with the French rhotic /ʁ/, but more willingly with a velar stop /ɡ/, as exemplified in (5b).…”

The unnatural /Cju/ (< foreign /Cy/) sequence in Russian loanwords: A problem for the perceptual view

“…(2) Preservation Principle (Paradis and LaCharité, 1997): Distinctive phonological information must be maximally preserved within the limits of the Threshold Principle 3 (see, e.g., Paradis et al, 1993 andLaCharité, 2001, for slightly different formulations of this principle).…”

Consonantal Adaptation of Arabic Loanwords in Kiswahili and Kisukuma: A Phonological Explanation

“…Furthermore, Paradis and LaCharité (2001) observe that /h/ is systematically deleted in some languages, but it is consistently preserved in others. The authors contend that /h/ -deletion cannot be attributed to Paradis and LaCharité's (1997) Threshold Principle, according to which /h/ should be adapted (i.e., preserved), rather than deleted, because its adaptation would not exceed two steps of repair.…”

“…The authors contend that /h/ -deletion cannot be attributed to Paradis and LaCharité's (1997) Threshold Principle, according to which /h/ should be adapted (i.e., preserved), rather than deleted, because its adaptation would not exceed two steps of repair. Considering the failure of the Threshold Principle to account for /h/ -deletion, Paradis and LaCharité (2001) propose the Non-Availability Hypothesis, stated below:…”