Re: Conflicts in loanword adaptation

On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 03:10:03AM +0300, JR wrote:
> 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?
It depends on the language (and possibly the speakers). Stress is
usually one of the first things to go, as well as declension.

For example, the name of the historical king Darius is correctly
accented on the /i/, not on the /a/ as most people pronounce it. But
going around saying [d@'raj@s] sounds awfully pretentious unless you're
speaking to like-clued people.

Similarly, the correct plural of 'octopus' is 'octopodes' (Greek), but
just about nobody speaks that way. The fact is that once a word is
borrowed into a language, it becomes subject to native rules, no longer
to rules in the original language.

Witness also 'alcohol', 'algebra', and 'algorithm', where the article of
the source language has become part of the loanword, and the stress is
placed as if these were native words.


> 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.
[...]

If it doesn't contort the native lang too much, that works. But
sometimes the target language is just so incompatibly different that you
just have to butcher the word to make it fit.

For example, Japanese loans from English have a lot of epithentic vowels
inserted to remove consonant clusters hard for natives to pronounce, and
have consonants suitably modified to work with Japanese phonology.
Natives still consider the words foreign borrowings (which fact
apparently adds a "coolness" factor to a word).

Mandarin is especially notorious for totally butchering names by trying
to shoehorn Western names into the trisyllabic scheme.  The general
procedure is to take the first two syllables from a Western first name
(and dropping the rest), the first syllable from the last name, mold
them appropriately to fit Mandarin phonology, and then assigning to
characters meaningful related (sometimes only barely or not at all) to
the original name.  Needless to say, the placement of stress in the
original is completely irrelevant: the tones in the result are freely
varied in order to find the most "meaningful" combination of characters.

On the other end of the spectrum, some English loanwords in Russian
actually break native pronunciation rules (such as unstressed о being
pronounced [o] instead of [ʌ] because the source language has it as
such), and spelling conventions (such as э in places where it would
never occur in a native word, in order to retain a semblance of the
original pronunciation of the loanword).


T

--
The easy way is the wrong way, and the hard way is the stupid way. Pick one.