For next week’s class (March 12):

• Read pp.122–140 in Language Files. There’ll be a quiz on this reading at the start of class.
• Submit blog post #2 by the start of class. Your post will be graded according to this rubric. The assignment is as follows:

As discussed in the textbook and in class, when a word is borrowed from one language into another, its pronunciation is adapted to suit the phonotactics and phonemic inventory of the borrowing language.

For example, when birth control /bəɹθ kəntɹol/ was borrowed into Japanese, its pronunciation became [ba:sɯ kontoɾo:ɾɯ]. The different phonemic inventories in Japanese and English mean that several sounds had to be reassigned. In Japanese, there is no [θ], so this sound was reassigned to [s], which is the sound in Japanese most similar to [θ]. (Both are voiceless fricatives.) And in Japanese, the rhotic consonant is [ɾ], not [ɹ], so this sound got reassigned as well – and since there is no [l], it, too, got reassigned to [ɾ].

In terms of phonotactics, consonant clusters like the “tr” are not allowed at the start of a syllable, so an [o] got inserted there. And syllables usually can’t end in non-nasal consonants, so a [ɯ] got inserted at the end of both words.

Your assignment for this blog post is to identify a similar example. What’s a word or phrase that got borrowed from one language (the donor language) into another language (the borrowing language)? How is it pronounced in the donor language, and how is it pronounced in the borrowing language? Show pronunciation using the IPA. What’s different? And how was the pronunciation adapted to fit the phonemic inventory and phonotactics of the borrowing language?

If you use a word borrowed into English, the Oxford English Dictionary is a great resource. Log in with your CSI library credentials. Any resources you use should be scholarly – peer-reviewed or published by a reputable press, ideally an academic publisher. You can use any citation format you like (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.), just make sure you’re consistent.

This should be at least 150 words long.