Blog Post #2

One word that I found that was interestingly borrowed from one language (the donor language) into another language (the borrowing language) is the word champagne. This particular word is of multiple origins but was borrowed from the French vocabulary into the English vocabulary. In French champagne is pronounced like cham+pagne [ʃɑ̃.paɲ] and in English it is pronounced like sham+payn [ʃæmˈpeɪn]. Even though champagne has the same definition in both languages, the pronunciation of the word has adapted to fit into the phonemic inventory and phonotactics of English. There are a couple of differences between the way English speakers and French speakers pronounce the word ‘champagne’ an English speaker pronounces the [ʃ] sound like ‘sh’, while a French speaker pronounces [ʃ] like ‘ch’. Instead of using a nasalized vowel like [ɑ̃] which is pronounced like ‘am’, we replaced it with the front low unrounded vowel [æ]. As for the second syllable a French speaker would pronounce ‘pagne’ using the following sounds: [p],[a], [ɲ]. In English we don’t have a palatal nasal sound, so we replaced it with the high-mid, tense, front vowel [eɪ].

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