Blog Post 2

One word that I found that Japanese (borrowing language) borrowed from English (donor language) is milk. When milk, pronounced as /mɪlk/ was adapted to Japanese phonotactics and phonemic inventory, the pronunciation was changed to /miɾɯkɯ/. Several changes were made to adapt English phonotactics and phonemic inventory to Japanese phonotactics and phonemic inventory. In Japanese, there cannot be consonant clusters so to fix the English pronunciation, the vowel sound [ɯ] was added in between consonants. Along with that, the [l] sound was changed to an alveolar tap [ɾ], a sound kind of between “r” and “l” as Japanese doesn’t have the [l] sound. Finally, the syllable structure was changed. From one syllable, “milk”, to three syllables “mi ru ku”. This change allows native Japanese speakers to easily pronounce the word as there usually aren’t one syllable words in Japanese.

Leave a Reply