Orthographic Traces in Romanian and Japanese Loanwords: Enriching Phonological Representations

Abstract

This paper presents a formal account of the influence of orthography in the adaptation of Romanian loanwords from French and Japanese loanwords from English. It agues that, in the course of adaptation, the accompanying presence of a written representation does play a part in shaping the phonological content of borrowed words. To explain such orthographic manifestations in loanwords, a grammatical mechanism is devised in which underlying input representations are composed of linguistic information emanating from both the native perceptual system and the grapheme-phoneme mapping procedure. Cast in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004), the bulk of the analysis rests in determining how the grammar evaluates output forms resulting from such amalgamated inputs. Theoretical implications of such a proposal are also discussed, in particular as it concerns the nature of input coding and representation. In short, phonological representations are assumed to embrace the segmental richness imparted by both speech and print.