Chinese Loanword Phonology

Loanword phonology involves phonetic, phonological and perceptual perspectives. This article is a case study of Chinese loanword phonology, taking English-origin loanword adaptation as an example, it makes a systematic analysis of the sound changes that loanwords undergo, including the adaptation of consonants, vowels, prosodic structures and phonological processes, like epenthesis and deletion triggered by syllable structures and phonotactics. The aim of this article is to make a thorough description and interpretation of the adaption in Chinese loanword phonology, seeking its mechanism and figure out the applicability of different views in loanword literature.After a loanword from the source language enters borrowing language, it is altered to conform to recipient language phonology, sounds just like an ordinary word of that language and is subject to all its rules. Adaptation was performed by proficient bilinguals who know well the phonological structures of both the source language and target language, the recipient language speaker interpret input signals within the confines of his own phonology and make the corresponding mapping. Words conform to the sound pattern of the borrowing language receive a faithful adaptation, sounds which do not occur in the borrowing language are either deleted or replaced by familiar native ones. But what is familiar and in what level, this paper takes the view that perceptual and phonological knowledge of borrowers play crucial roles, phonetic approximation and perceptual adaptation are the basic factors, perceptual grammar will decide which aspect of acoustic signal has a linguistic significance and just for this part will be dealt further. The adapted segments, suprasegments and the original ones share some major phonological features, which are the basis of acoustic similarity. Adaptation is also an operation in phonological level, subphonemics play little roles and are adapted in the same way, like the adaptation of aspirated/unaspirated stops and the mapping English liquid 1/r. Perceptual salience is another factor which play a crucial role in loanword adaptation, usually the perceptual salient segments or suprasegments will get a corresponding mapping, and if a phonological constituent needs to be added or dropped, a perceptual nonsalient one should be considered. Take epenthesis as an example, the underlying default, unmarked /(?)/is usually the best choice. Therefore, phonetic approximation, phonological factors and perceptual salience all play certain roles in some aspects of Chinese loanword phonology.In prosodic adaptation, since there is stress in the word level in Chinese or at least borrowers can not feel stress perceptually, therefore, correspondence will not be set up at the prosodic level between two languages. Chinese is a tone language, each word needs to be assigned a tone. This article finds that borrowers are still sensitive to the position of stress in certain level, which tone will be assigned to a word always follow the FO contour of its origin word. As to the inserted vowel, it often carries a low tone or falling tone, which perceptually decreases salience.Apart from phonetic, phonological and perceptual constraints, loanword adaptation is also influenced by non-linguistic factors, including orthography, dialects, choice of charcters, semantics, word borrowing history, character frequency, bilingual proficiency and social conditions where loanword adaptation happened, which cause several unfaithful adaptations and exceptions.This paper utilizes optimality theoretic approach to analyze some loanword data, OT has its own advantage in interpreting borrowing process, partly because loanword itself does not have intermediate level, whose internal structure is invisible. Therefore, the analysis of loanwords is compatible with the essence of OT, so does the borrowing process with the interactions of constraints. This article finds that classical OT can properly deal with the mapping process of loanword adaptation, to some degree illustrating the importance of applicability of a theory to its object.