Re: Conflicts in loanword adaptation

>I want to have one conlang, Eloshtan, borrow the word 'galïli' from another
>conlang, Kar Marinam. The stress on that word in K.M. is on the second
>syllable, but in Eloshtan, the stress is always on the first syllable. So,
>I
>have two choices: either borrow the word as 'galili' with a different
>stress; or drop the first vowel, and have 'glili', with the stress still on
>the 'li'. Does anyone know what natlangs do in this sort of situation?
>What's more important, retaining the stress, or retaining all the original
>sounds? Does it depend on the language in question, the whims of the
>speakers, other factors?
>
>Actually, I am aware that some natlangs would go a different route and
>adopt
>the word as is, with the foreign stress pattern, but I don't think E. is
>ready for this.
>
>--
>Josh Roth
Finnish also has initial stress & I don't think there's a single loanword
which would have dropped the 1st vowel if the 2nd was stressed. Obviously
our prohibition of initial clusters helps a lot with that, but even initial
unstressed shwas get assigned stress, usually cuppled with
de-neutralization. Example: "agility" has been borrowed from English in the
meaning of the dog sport, and gets pronounced ['&gi"liti] or ['&ki"liti].
Loanwords with non-initial stress do not exist either, but there are
sociolects (urban pre/teenagers chiefly) where phonemic stress has developed
due to influence of English & other IE langs.

So with simple non-phonemic stress placement, I'd expect the stress not to
be even noticed. More complex kinds of non-phonemic stress (eg. syllable
weight conditioned) could be more likely to trigger phonological reshaping,
but I'd still expect the "phoneme-shape" of the word to matter more.
Borrowed stress patterns probably don't happen in single words, but maybe if
the influence were heavy & there would be plenty of such words...

John Vertical

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