Re: CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute

John Cowan wrote:
>There seems to be some evidence that for speakers of a language, there is
>some other specific language that all foreign words are assumed to be in.
>For English, it's French.
I have a sort of "default foreign pronunciation", that doesn't seem
correspond exactly to any specific language's orthography - it's more of an
average of various western ones. I tend to give unknown words final stress
or penultimate stress, presumeably due to Spanish and French influence (not
that I know either language ...).

>
>A lot more on this at http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/issues/6/6-555.html#1
>
>ObConlang: how do people's conlangs handle foreign words?  Lojban has an
>elaborate mechanism for borrowing (the Lojban idiom is "taking" -- they
>aren't returned) foreign words and applying native prefixes that both make
>them fit Lojban's morphology and give a clue to Lojban-speakers who don't
>recognize the foreign word what it might be about.  Thus cidjrspageti
>is spaghetti, but the prefix "cidj-" reflects Lojban *cidja* 'food'.
Mainly due to its IPAesque nature, the uses of the letters of the Maidzhen
Klaish are more similar between languages than is the case for the latin
alphabet. F'rinstance, all langs with a /tS/ phoneme in the region use the
|tS| digraph for it.

The |x G N h h\ ? j w| letters have no use in Tairezan orthography. When
they occur loanwords, the first three are traditionally pronounced as [k g
n], and the rest silent. To retain the native pronunciations of any of
these, or foreign pronunciations of other letters, in normal speech would be
considered rather snobbish by most people. OTOH, you may come over as
undereducated if you indescriminately apply Tairezan initial stress to
foreign words. To avoid this, many speakers automatically use penultimate
stress on all foreign words, following the rule of Altaii and a common
state-of-affairs in Keshean.

A special case is Steianzh. Since it's so close to Tairezazh, there are few
actual loans - instead people use the corresponding Tairezan words after a
Steianan pattern. But many Steianan names of people, places and institutions
are regularly heard by the average Tairezan. So it's a long standing
tradition to have snobbish characters in books etc pronounce such with
penultimate stress, despite Steianzh having extremely rigid initial stress.
You may even have such monsters as _stanezene_ "dancing" (occurs in the name
of the famous Steianan cultural establishment _E' Stanezene Daive_) with the
stress on the second "e" - which's completely silent in the Steianan
pronunciation ['stan@zn@]*.

* Technically, all the consonants are dental, but ['s_dt_dan_d@z_dn_d@] just
looks too ugly!

                                                Andreas



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