1 INTRODUCTION Loanword phonology constitutes a highly interesting topic within linguistics, because it describes a conflict within a sound system that is resolved differently by different languages. On one hand, languages attempt to preserve loanwords as close to the source as possible; on the other hand, borrowed words need to be adjusted to fit into the native system of the borrowing language. In this interplay between faithfulness to the source language and obeying the native system, borrowing languages apply repair strategies on borrowed words that provide an understanding of phonological and phonetic principles of the language s grammar. Thus, the study of loanwords provides valuable insights into the functioning of phonological systems that would otherwise remain undetected. This dissertation is based on a corpus of German and French loanwords with front rounded vowels borrowed into Japanese. It is an extension of my M.A. thesis on the phonological adaptation of German loanwords in Japanese (Dohlus 2002). Whereas the M.A. thesis treated syllabic, segmental, and prosodic changes alike, this dissertation focuses solely on segmental changes concerning German and French front rounded vowels in Japanese. Japanese with its fivevowel system of short and long /i, u, e, o, a/ does not contrast front unrounded and front rounded vowels and does not incorporate these foreign sounds into its native phonological system. The aim of the study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the adaptation patterns of German and French front rounded vowels into Japanese, and through this to contribute more generally to theories on loanword adaptations. In a narrow sense, this dissertation aims at describing and analysing the segmental changes that front rounded vowels undergo when adapted into Japanese. In a broader sense it aims at giving a clearer understanding of the role of phonology and perception/phonetics in adaptation processes. Why front rounded vowels? Front rounded vowels carry the highly marked feature combination of front tongue position and lip rounding. The majority of languages, among them Japanese, do not allow front rounded vowels and faces difficulties when confronted with these vowels in borrowed words. Languages develop different strategies for preserving the features of front rounded vowels to the greatest extent possible while simultaneously obeying native restrictions. The variety of adaptation forms for front rounded vowels in languages makes research on their adaptation a useful contribution to research on loanword phonology and adaptation theories. Why Japanese? Japanese is renowned for its openness towards foreign words and has accepted an enormous number of Western loanwords within the last centuries. This number of loanwords and its meticulous collection in loanword dictionaries make Japanese a rich source for loanword data. Japanese grammar further facilitates loanword research, because its grammar does not demand morphological adjustments on the nouns. While morphological components in loanword adaptation ought to be investigated, this study opts to concentrate solely on phonological and phonetic changes. Moreover, Japanese with its 1
fairly small phoneme inventory and simple syllable structure is a highly interesting language for studies on adaptations, because a high number of segments or structures from other languages are illicit in Japanese and so need to be repaired in adaptation processes. Of concern for this study is the fact that Japanese with its simple five-vowel system does not have front rounded vowels. Lastly, Japanese has a unique writing system that demands further adjustment of borrowed words into a different writing system, namely the Japanese syllabary katakana. Why front rounded vowels in Japanese? First of all, studies on loanword adaptation with respect to segmental changes appear to focus on consonants, whereas vowels are treated only marginally (Yip 2002). More importantly, Japanese loanword phonology naturally focuses on loanwords from English, which has become the richest source for loanwords in Japan. Borrowed words from English do not pose the problem of the adaptation of front rounded vowels, because contemporary English lacks front rounded vowels. It is probably for this reasons (English being the richest source, but lacking front rounded vowels) that the adaptation of front rounded vowels into Japanese has not been studied systematically. French and German are the second and third richest source of loanwords in contemporary Japanese. Both languages have front rounded vowels, and thus loanwords borrowed from French or German offer a research field so far neglected in loanword research on Japanese. In brief, the adaptation of front rounded vowels into Japanese has not been studied in detail up to this point, which was the key motivation for this dissertation. The basis of the study is a corpus comprised of 142 established loanwords and proper names with front rounded vowels borrowed from German and French into Japanese. On the basis of this corpus, this study analyses the adaptation forms of front rounded vowels in Japanese from a phonological and a phonetic perspective. Front rounded vowels show a high uniformity in their respective adaptation patterns in Japanese. The following adaptation patterns describe the overwhelming majority of the relevant German and French data in Japanese. (1) Adaptation patterns of German and French front rounded vowels in Japanese a) German /, / Japanese /ju( )/ b) French / / Japanese /ju( )/ c) German /, / Japanese /e( )/ d) French /, / Japanese /u( )/ As can be seen in (1), German and French high front rounded vowels are equally adapted as the sequence /ju( )/ into Japanese. In contrast, German and French mid front rounded vowels follow different adaptation patterns in Japanese. German /, / are adapted as the single segment /e( )/, but French /, / as the single segment /u( )/ into Japanese. Moreover, results of perceptual experiments conducted by the author demonstrate that the perceptually closest phoneme to German (and French) high and mid front rounded vowels appears to be /u/ in Japanese. This is consistent with the adaptation pattern of French mid front 2
rounded vowels as /u( )/ in Japanese, but it is neither consistent with the adaptation pattern of German and French high front rounded vowels nor with the adaptation pattern of German mid front rounded vowels. When examining the data, the following questions inevitably arise: First, why are high and mid front rounded vowels adapted differently, i.e., the high vowels as a glide-vowel sequence, but the mid vowels as single segments? Second, why do results of perceptual experiments only conform to the adaptation pattern of French mid front rounded vowels, but contradict the actual adaptation patterns of German and French high and German mid front rounded vowels in Japanese? Third, why are German and French mid front rounded vowels, although phonologically and phonetically similar, adapted differently into Japanese? It is these questions that the present study attempts to answer. The questions raised above constitute interesting phenomena contributing to the theoretical debate on the role of phonology and phonetics in adaptation processes. Current research distinguishes two main approaches towards loanword adaptation, a phonological approach (Paradis 1996, Paradis and LaCharité 1997, and LaCharité and Paradis 2005, among others) and a phonetic approach (Peperkamp and Dupoux 2003 and Vendelin and Peperkamp 2004, among others). The phonological approach claims that foreign sounds are represented by the phonologically closest match of the borrowing language. In contrast, the phonetic approach claims that adaptations are phonetically driven and solely determined by perception. In order to gain a better understanding of the role of phonology and phonetics/perception in the adaptation process, the analysis of this study is twofold. First, an analysis in phonological terms, namely a comparison of the phonological representations of the sounds in the source languages and the borrowing language, is performed. The phonological analysis suggests that the adaptation of German high and mid front rounded vowels is phonologically grounded, and accounts for the adaptation of high front rounded vowels as /ju( )/ and of German /, / as /e( )/ in Japanese; it fails, though, to explain the adaptation pattern of French /, / as /u( )/ in Japanese. The phonological analysis offers an explanation for the asymmetry in the adaptation of high versus mid front rounded vowels. The asymmetry between high front rounded vowels being adapted as a sequence of glide and vowel, and mid front-rounded vowels as single vowels, is shown to be the consequence of the different height specifications of the input vowels. The adaptation pattern of /, / as Japanese /ju( )/ allows the maintenance of all features of the source, but the vowels /, / cannot follow this pattern because they are mid vowels. If /, / were adapted as the glide-vowel sequence /jo( )/, it would require an additional specification for height, namely [+high] for the glide of the output sequence. Due to this fact, the mid vowels cannot be adapted as a sequence of glide and vowel, but are instead adapted as single segments. These results are analysed in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy and Prince 1993a,b). 3
A second analysis is carried out from a phonetic-perceptual viewpoint. Results of the phonetic comparison and perceptual experiments are compared to the actual adaptation forms of front rounded vowels in Japanese. The phonetic analysis is able to account for the adaptation pattern of high front rounded vowels as /ju( )/ and French mid front rounded vowels as /u( )/ in Japanese, but it has no explanation for the adaptation of German /, / into Japanese as /e( )/. Second, the fact that the data of established loanwords in Japanese could not, but for the French mid front rounded vowels, be confirmed by perceptual experiments shows that the adaptation of high and German mid front rounded vowels into Japanese is not (purely) perceptually based. That /u( )/ is not found as an adaptation form for high or German mid front rounded vowels suggests an only limited role of perception in adaptation processes. From the results of a phonological and a phonetic analysis it is concluded that neither a purely phonological nor a purely phonetic approach towards loanword adaptation are able to account for the data in this study. This dissertation proposes that adaptations may apply on a perceptual-phonetic and a phonological level. Exchange in spoken language provides access to the phonetic form of the source language, which is categorized through the filter of a speaker s native language. On the other hand, bilingual borrowers are able to correctly identify the phonological form of the source language irrespective of misperception. In this case, adaptations are the result of phonological repairs applied in order to adjust the otherwise correctly identified word to the native language. In other words, borrowers, who are assumed to be bilingual speakers, have access to both the phonological and the phonetic form of the source language, and can consequently establish similarity to the source in phonological or perceptual-phonetic terms. The asymmetry in the adaptation patterns of German versus French mid front rounded vowels is hypothesized to be caused by the different roles that German and French loanwords play in Japanese. Most of the German loanwords in Japanese are academic terms used in sciences only. This indicates that German words almost certainly reached Japan in the context of the studies of sciences, and thus mainly via written media. In contrast, French loanwords appear to have played a great role in everyday-communication and thus French most likely provided more oral input than German. It is argued that perception played a greater role in the adaptation of French front rounded vowels, whereas knowledge in the source language and written forms predominately influenced the adaptation form of German front rounded vowels. In sum, the major claim put forward in this study is that adaptations are complex processes, where not only native perception, but also other factors such as knowledge of the source language and orthography play a major role. Further influence on adaptations is exerted by socio-linguistic aspects such as the borrowing situation, the role of the source language in the borrowing language, the level of bilingualism and standardizations. For these reasons, this study concludes that an analysis of loanword adaptations needs to include a thorough ex- 4
amination of phonetic as well as phonological similarity between the source and the borrowing language, and should also, if possible, take into account the sociolinguistic setting of the borrowing process. To conclude, this dissertation represents an empirical and theoretical contribution to research on loanword adaptation. It offers empirical data on the adaptation of front rounded vowels and gives insights into the adaptation patterns of these vowels in a language that lacks them. In a broader sense, this dissertation contributes to the discussion on theories of loanword adaptation by demonstrating problems that face a purely phonological or a purely phonetic approach towards loanword adaptation and offers a comprehensive view on the role of phonology, phonetics, and influencing factors on adaptation processes. This dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 2 surveys previous literature on the topic of this study and introduces the main approaches to loanword adaptation with the focus on the phonological approach in subsection 2.3.1 and the phonetic approach in subsection 2.3.2. Section 2.4 introduces the approach taken in the this study. Chapter 3 gives a brief overview of the vowel systems of the languages that are treated in this study, which are Japanese (section 3.1), German (section 3.2), and French (section 3.3). Section 3.4 discusses the markedness of front rounded vowels. Chapter 4 describes the database that is the basis of this study and presents the adaptation patterns of German and French front rounded vowels in Japanese. Following a description of the design and content of the database in section 4.1, section 4.2 gives a short introduction on the role of German and French loanwords in Japanese. Section 4.3 briefly describes the general adaptation patterns of German and French vowels in Japanese apart from the specific adaptations of front rounded vowels. Sections 4.4 and 4.5 present the adaptation patterns of German and French high (section 4.4) and mid (section 4.5) front rounded vowels in Japanese. Chapter 5 and chapter 6 present the main analyses of the dissertation. Chapter 5 examines the adaptation patterns in Japanese from a phonological perspective. After working out the phonological mismatch between the vowel categories of German or French and Japanese in section 5.1, a phonological analysis of the data is performed by comparing the phonological categories of the source vowels and the phonological categories of their adaptation forms in Japanese. The adaptation pattern of high front rounded vowels is treated in section 5.2, and that of the mid front rounded vowels in section 5.3 (German) and 5.4 (French). An explanation for the asymmetry of high vowels being adapted as a glide-vowel sequence and mid vowels being adapted as a single segment is provided in section 5.5. An analysis within the framework of Optimality Theory is presented in section 5.6. The problems of the phonological analysis are discussed in section 5.7, followed by the conclusion in section 5.8. Chapter 6 analyses the adaptation patterns of front rounded vowels in Japanese from a phonetic perspective. Following a description of the languagespecific nature of speech perception in section 6.1, section 6.2 works out the perceptual mismatch that Japanese speakers face when confronted with front 5
rounded vowels. The following three sections present evidence that /u/ is the perceptually closest sound to German and French front rounded vowels in Japanese. Section 6.3 describes and presents results of a perceptual experiment testing the perception of German front rounded vowels by native speakers of Japanese. Section 6.4 offers an explanation of the results of this experiment by performing a comparison of the phonetic features of the vowels of French and German on one hand and that of Japanese on the other hand. Section 6.5 presents the results of a categorization experiment using synthetic vowel stimuli. Finally, these results are compared to the actual adaptation patterns of established loanwords in Japanese in section 6.6. Section 6.7 discusses how perceptually-driven adaptations, such as the adaptation of mid front rounded vowels as /u/ into Japanese, may be analysed in the framework of Optimality Theory. A discussion and conclusion of the phonetic analysis are presented in sections 6.8 and 6.9. Chapter 7 is dedicated to the asymmetry in the adaptation patterns of German and French mid front rounded vowels in Japanese and includes a discussion of the role of phonology and phonetics in loanword adaptation in this context. Section 7.1 lays out the asymmetry of German /, / becoming /e( )/, but French /, / becoming /u( )/ in Japanese. The German and French input vowels are compared in order to exclude the possibility of the asymmetry being caused by differences between the input vowels, and subsequently demonstrates that neither a phonological nor a phonetic approach alone can account for the asymmetry. Section 7.2 discusses several factors influencing loanword adaptations, namely perception, knowledge, and orthography. This is followed by section 7.3, in which the necessity to include considerations on the borrowing situation in the analysis of adaptation patterns is discussed. Section 7.4 offers a hypothesis on the causes of different adaptation strategies for German versus French mid front rounded vowels by demonstrating how factors such as perception, knowledge, and written forms have a different impact on the adaptation of German and French loanwords owing to the different roles that German and French loanwords play in Japanese. Finally, section 7.5 summarizes the effect of these factors on adaptation processes and treats the issue of how to adequately analyse adaptation processes that are influenced by such a variety of factors. Section 7.6 presents the conclusion. Chapter 8 concludes this study with a summary of the main results and a discussion of open issues for further research. 6