Re: Finnish English

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 12/13/05, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> > Don't forget either that several common sounds that Finnish lacks
> > (primarily
> > /f b g S/) have settled in as "loanword phonemes" in several dialects.
> > Does
> > such a thing that happen in any other languages BTW?
>
> Assuming I understand what you mean by "loanword phoneme", then sure,
> this happens all the time.  (snip)
Goodness yes. Indonesian/Malay has adopted tons of Arabic religious terms,
some of which are quite generally known, and pronounced correctly by most
(almost all Moslem children are taught to recite the Koran, and YOU GET IT
RIGHT, OR ELSE!!).  I mentioned a few the other day in my post about Elomi
pronunciation--/f, z/ in particular: fajar ['fadZar] 'the dawn call to
prayer' now also simply 'dawn'; idul fitri 'the festival at the end of
Ramadan'; zaman 'era, epoch' (a little more on the scholarly side); zina
'adultery'.  Some of the z-words have variants with j-, jaman for one, but
also (I assume related) jam 'hour, time' (no "zam"). Some Arab. words, even
religious ones, have alternates, e.g. isya ['iSa] ~isa 'the +/- 8pm call to
prayer'; but syukur '(give) thanks' as a proper name is usually ['Sukur].
Intervoc. /?/ is from Arabic too-- do'a 'prayer', ra'yat ~rakyat 'the
people'; no doubt aided by the fact that Ml. has [?] in certain conditioned
environments.

There is also a layer of old Portuguese loans that had -s- = [z], but these
all have /j/:  mesa 'table' > meja; camisa 'shirt' > kemeja [k@'meja].

The usual fate of borrowed /f/ however is Indo. /p/-- kopi 'coffee', pikir
'think' < Arab. fikr; but the rare instances of /v/ > [f], not /b/ as one
might expect (probably due to Dutch)-- "veteran" is a common place/street
name, ['fEt@ran], "TV" is [ti'fi].

Sanskrit and later Indic languages helped phonemicize /e, o/ again aided by
the presence of conditioned [e,o] = /i,u/-- beda 'different', dosa 'sin' et
al.; also aided by numerous loans from Javanese, where e/o are phonemic.
(Jav. in fact might likely be the intermediary).

One of the orthograpic differences between Indo. and Malay (as national
langs.) is that Indo. mostly has the i/u form, Malay the conditioned e/o--
putih vs. puteh 'white', hidung vs. hidong 'nose'; sepuluh vs. sepuloh '10'
but both occasionally have the e/o form only: tolong 'help' (but tulung in
some relatives, < *tuluN); and also benteng ['bEntEN] 'fort, fortress' that
IIRC is of native origin.