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Emphatic consonants and the adaptation of vowels in French loanwords into Moroccan Arabic| old_uid | 5606 |
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| title | Emphatic consonants and the adaptation of vowels in French loanwords into Moroccan Arabic |
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| start_date | 2008/11/17 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| details | Joint research with Nabila Louriz, University Hassan II |
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| summary | It is well known that redundant (enhancing) features in a vowel can signal a phonemic contrast in an adjacent consonant. For example, English vowel duration and nasality are tied directly to the voicing and nasality of a following consonant. In Mandarin Chinese [±back] in a vowel correlates with coronal vs. velar nasal in following consonant. Hsieh et al (2005) show that when western loanwords with conflicting vowel and coda nasal combinations [an] and [Ã?ng] are adapted into Mandarin, the redundant vowel rather than the distinctive consonant determines the outcome ? a result they attributte to the relative saliency of the phonologically redundant vocalic difference vis a vis the consonant. In his groundbreaking study of borrowings into Moroccan Arabic, Heath (1989) identified another striking example of this phenomenon, observing that the mid vowels of French <moquette> are preserved by introducing emphasis (pharyngealization) on the consonants in the loan /MukeT/. He also pointed to the variability of the phenomenon since Spanish muñeca is borrowed as MA /munik-a/ rather than /muNek-a/ or /MuNek-a/. In this presentation we review the results of a detailed study of this phenomenon from a corpus of c. 1,800 French loans. We discuss the competing phonological and phonetic factors that underlie the adaptations and appear to give rise to its variability. |
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| responsibles | Aroui |
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