The adaptation of Romanian loanwords from Turkish and French

Abstract

This paper examines several factors affecting loanword adaptation, using a data set of Romanian loanwords from Turkish and French. After exploring the position of loanwords in the lexicon and the nature of the two contact situations, the author considers relevant social, morphological, and phonological factors. First is the difference in the loanwords’ semantic domains and their motivations for being borrowed. Next, the author introduces the morphophonological factors considered—stress, desinence class, and gender assignment—and discusses their behavior in the core vocabulary and previous relevant studies. Subsequently, the author examines the loanword data in detail, comparing and contrasting the Turkish- and French-origin loanwords. The author concludes that one must consider different modules of the language—the phonology and the morphology—and that only by contrasting borrowings from different languages into the same language can one determine the relative effect of internal and external factors on the outcome of contact.

The Phonology of Anglicisms in French, German and Czech: A Contrastive Approach

“…Moreover, the phonology of loanwords is affected by extragrammatical factors and two of these factors are of particular relevance here. First, despite the standard view of phonology as a system independent of orthography, it has been demonstrated that loanwords are particularly exposed to the influence of spelling, as they are -more than native words -transmitted and learned in writing (Smith, 2006;Friesner, 2009;Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010;Molęda, 2011). Second, the adaptation of words borrowed from a particular language is at least partly conditioned by the status of this language and the knowledge of this language in the target population (Kang, 2011).…”

Language dominance as a factor in loanword phonology

“…the preservation of original pronunciation), is that the ability to accurately pronounce a foreign structure is not sufficient in explaining the choice between these two integration strategies (e.g. Aktürk-Drake, 2011, 2014; Friesner, 2009a; Paradis & LaCharité, 1997, 2008; Poplack et al, 1988). Even when borrowers have the necessary linguistic competence in the donor language (which is often a second or foreign language), they are sometimes known to alter their pronunciation when they produce the same word as a loanword in their first language (L1) (Aktürk-Drake, 2014; Friesner, 2009b).…”

The emergence of phonological adaptation from phonetic adaptation: English loanwords in Korean

“…Also, given the same two languages, depending on the sociolinguistic circumstances of the contact and the channel of borrowing, the outcome of adaptation can differ significantly (Yip 2002, Smith 2006, Heffernan 2007, Friesner 2009a, Y. Kang, forthcoming). Moreover, adaptations of both types – phonological and phonetic – are often attested within a single contact situation (Friesner 2009a, b, Chang, to appear, Y. Kang, forthcoming). In other words, there is growing awareness of the multi-faceted nature of loanword phenomena in the field, and in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of loanwords, it is informative to examine how adaptation forms are transmitted through the community (cf.…”