Re: phonology of borrowed words

> Is there any sort of general wisdom about how 'foreign' phonemes
> get altered when brought into a language?
We could talk about how Arabic treats certain foreign sounds not found in
Arabic:

/p/ is written as /b/ (so Pompeii and Bombay are the same)
/tS/ is written as /dZ/
/Z/ is written as /z/ (or /dZ/?)
/v/ is written as /f/
/g/ is written as /k/

These above conventions are used for Farsi, Urdu, Turkish and others, with
three dots (or an oblique stroke for /g/) being used. These are not commonly
used in Arabic. This is evident in the traditional names of the notes of the
musical scale: Persian _chahArgah_ "fourth position" is _jahArkah_ (F above
middle C), and _bozorg_ "big" becomes _buzurk_ (E quarter-tone flat above
high C).

Anyway, the Arabic rule is to adopt the voiceless or voiced equivalent of
the sound.

Now if we went the opposite direction, say, how Farsi speakers pronounce
Arabic consonants:

/T/ _seh senokteh_ > /s/
/H/ _he jimi_ > /h/
/D/ > /z/
/s~/ > /s/
/d~/ > /z/
/t~/ > /t/
/D~/ > /z/
/3/ > /?/
/q/ > /G/ (/q/ in conservative dialects, also Persian words in Urdu)

Obviously the "emphaticness" (i.e. pharyngealization) is lost, and there is
a tendency towards fricatives in most cases.

~Danny~