SegBo: A Database of Borrowed Sounds in the World’s Languages

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 5316–5322 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 5316 SegBo: A Database of Borrowed Sounds in the World’s Languages Eitan Grossman1, Elad Eisen1, Dmitry Nikolaev2, Steven Moran3 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem1, University of Stockholm12, University of Zurich3 Jerusalem, Israel1, Stockholm, Sweden2, Zurich, Switzerland3 {eitan.grossman, elad.eisen}@mail.huji.ac.il, dmitry.nikolaev@ling.su.se, steven.moran@uzh.ch Abstract Phonological segment borrowing is a process through which languages acquire new contrastive speech sounds as the result of borrowing new words from other languages. Despite the fact that phonological segment borrowing is documented in many of the world’s languages, to date there has been no large-scale quantitative study of the phenomenon. In this paper, we present SEGBO, a novel cross-linguistic database of borrowed phonological segments. We describe our data aggregation pipeline and the resulting language sample. We also present two short case studies based on the database. The first deals with the impact of large colonial languages on the sound systems of the world’s languages; the second deals with universals of borrowing in the domain of rhotic consonants. Keywords: linguistic database, language contact, typology, phonology 1. Overview Phonological segment borrowing is a process through which languages acquire new speech sounds as the result of borrowing new words from other languages. All spoken languages have sound systems that are composed of a set of phonological segments (consonants and vowels) that are contrastive, i.e., they create lexical or grammatical distinctions, as well as suprasegmentals (e.g., stress, tone, intonation), which may also be linguistically contrastive. All languages can acquire new phonological segments in a number of ways. One well-known, but hitherto under- explored way a language can acquire new phonological segments, is via lexical borrowing. Despite the fact that phonological segment borrowing is documented in many of the world’s languages (e.g., as described by linguists in grammars and phonological descriptions), to date there has been no large-scale quan- titative study of this phenomenon. This is mainly due to the lack of a cross-linguistic database that documents observations of phonological segment borrowing in the world’s languages. In this paper, we present SEGBO, a new cross-linguistic database of borrowed phonological segments, which in- cludes information about the languages that borrow (and lend) their speech sounds (Grossman et al., 2020). First we describe how we create this open-source resource from different input data sources and then we describe its cur- rent worldwide coverage. Finally, to illustrate the research viability of SEGBO, we present two brief case studies that use the database. The first deals with the impact of large colonial languages1 on the sound systems of the world’s languages; the second describes universals of borrowing in the domain of rhotic consonants, i.e., r-sounds. 1The term ‘colonial’ may be arguable for some cases; what we mean is languages that spread out considerably from their original homelands and are in some sense socio-politically dominant with respect to local indigenous languages. 2. Background All languages are influenced to some extent by …

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