How Regular is Japanese Loanword Adaptation? A Computational Study

Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 847–856, Osaka, Japan, December 11-17 2016. How Regular is Japanese Loanword Adaptation? A Computational Study Lingshuang Jack Mao and Mans Hulden Department of Linguistics University of Colorado {lima4664,mans.hulden}@colorado.edu Abstract The modifications that foreign loanwords undergo when adapted into Japanese have been the subject of much study in linguistics. The scholarly interest of the topic can be attributed to the fact that Japanese loanwords undergo a complex series of phonological adaptations, something which has been puzzling scholars for decades. While previous studies of Japanese loanword accommodation have focused on specific phonological phenomena of limited scope, the current study leverages computational methods to provide a more complete description of all the sound changes that occur when adopting English words into Japanese. To investigate this, we have de- veloped a parallel corpus of 250 English transcriptions and their respective Japanese equivalents. These words were then used to develop a wide-coverage finite state transducer based phonolog- ical grammar that mimics the behavior of the Japanese adaptation process, mapping e.g cream [kôi:m] to [kW.Ri:.mW]. By developing rules with the goal of accounting completely for a large number of borrowings, and analyzing forms mistakenly generated by the system, we discover an internal inconsistency within the loanword phonology of the Japanese language, something arguably underestimated by previous studies. The result of the investigation suggests that there are multiple dimensions that shape the output form of the current Japanese loanwords. These dimensions include orthography, phonetics, and historical changes. 1 Introduction Borrowing lexical items from one language to another is a common linguistic phenomenon. For example, someone can wear a beret /b@"reI/ while enjoying sushi /"suSi/ next to a pet alpaca /æl"pæk@/. Loanword adaptation refers to the process of how foreign sounds or phonological structures are made to conform to the sounds and structures of the recipient language (Goldsmith et al., 2011). Loanword phonology, as the study of the systematicity of such adaptation, attracts scholarly attention because it arguably ‘pushes the limit’ of the phonological system of the borrowing language in order to preserve the phonetic quality and phonological structure of the source language. This study aims to investigate how ‘systematic’ or ‘unsystematic’ a loanword phonology can be. We choose Japanese as our specific research context. Loanwords in Japanese are ubiquitous. According to Tsunoda (1988), loanwords account for 10 to 25 percent of the lexicon in nationally circulated, news-oriented weeklies, and up to 70 percent in profes- sional journals, medicine and science in particular. However, any attempt to provide a general account for the Japanese loanword adaptation mechanism is an ambitious enterprise because the loanword lexicon contains many phonological exceptions whose formation processes have become opaque. Furthermore, most earlier works in Japanese loanword phonology focus only on particulars or a handful of specific arguments revolving around a limited number of constraints, or assume that a set of rules or constraints discussed have covered all the phenomena; few works have actually given a complete overview of …

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