Re: CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute

Roger Mills <romilly@...> writes:

> One that always perplexes me-- in "The Godfather", The Don and others all
> pronounce the name "Tattaglia" with a /g/.
This is probably very common. As you probably know,
about 1/3 of the population of Argentina has an Italian
surname... and they all get pronounced as if they were
Spanish. I had a friend whose last name was "Cecchi"
and he was always /setSi/ -- never /tSek:i/ as it
should in proper Italian.

Amusing undigested English borrowings over here: "sorry"
(trilled or flapped), "crazy", "fast food" (rather like
[,fah'fuh]).

> >> ObConlang: how do people's conlangs handle foreign words
Yivokuchi is surrounded by related languages which haven't
diverged terribly away from their parent, so many borrowings
are not apparent at first sight. There are a few words that
were once in the language but were lost, and then reborrowed
from a sister tongue, like |dakh| 'death' (the usual root
is |beit-| 'dying'). Some words are entirely foreign and
very conspicuous, like |atlan| 'sea' from Hätsu |ätlän|
/@'t_L@n/, which has an anomalous cluster /tl/ and a
strange morphology. This word is marked [+foreign] by
many speakers, which try to imitate the lateral affricate
and the strong stress accent of the Hätsu word (Y. has
pitch accent and only a weak stress over the first, not
the second, syllable).


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/scifi2/nyh/index.html
  |Teoni wukakomo, teon bikosoki wuka bikosokvakomo.|
  "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."