The Principling Role of Korean in Phonological Adaptation
30th Anniversary Meeting of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics
Seoul National University, October 22, 2005
Gregory K. Iverson
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
iverson@uwm.edu
1. Introduction. The study of loanword phonology has experienced a sharp
resurgence in recent years, motivated by a theoretical interest in the idea that the ways
that borrowers adapt the pronunciation of foreign words can shed light on phonological
principles governing the language of the borrower — principles that otherwise might
not be open to observation. Researchers have generally been following two, largely
independent avenues of approach. On the one hand is the tradition of CATEGORY
PRESERVATION & PROXIMITY (or “Phonemic Approximation”), pursued especially in the
work of Darlene LaCharité and Carole Paradis (e.g., Paradis & LaCharité 1997,
LaCharité & Paradis 2002, 2005). The essence of this view is that loanword adaptation
is based chiefly on the perception by bilingual adapters of contrastive categories in the
source language as these are made to conform to the structural requirements of the
recipient language. On the other hand rests the model of PERCEPTUAL ASSIMILATION
(or “Phonetic Approximation”), which has been given prominence in the
psycholinguistic experimental work of Sharon Peperkamp and Emmanuel Dupoux (e.g.,
Dupoux et al. 1999, Peperkamp & Dupoux 2003, Peperkamp 2005). This approach
claims that loanword adaptations are phonetically minimal modifications, or
transformations, that apply “…during speech perception: the process of phonetic
decoding maps nonnative forms onto forms that are in accordance with the native
phonology. This process is thus influenced by but not identical to the phonology of the
listener’s native language.” (Peperkamp 2005:9). The Perceptual Assimilation model,
in short, sees loanword adaptation through the lens of the phonological system of the
recipient language, whereas the Category Preservation model attributes the nature and
directionality of adaptations to listeners’ awareness of the phonology of the source
language.
In this paper, I will highlight certain aspects of loanword adaptation in Korean that I
believe confirm the general thrust of the Perceptual Assimilation model, underscoring
that it is indeed the phonological categories of the recipient language rather than the
source which are determinative. I am honored to be in Seoul to bring these points
before the 30th anniversary meeting of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics,
and wish to express my appreciation to former President Sang-Oak Lee for arranging
and organizing this commemorative event, revealing again his characteristic skillfulness,
professionalism and dedication to the work of the Circle. I am also very pleased to be
joined today by many fine colleagues, from distinguished pioneers in Korean linguistics
2
— previous Presidents Chin-Wu Kim and Byung-Soo Park — to current collaborators,
former students and many enduring friends. None of these is responsible for the
perhaps odd title I have given for this talk, however: “The Principling Role of Korean
in Phonological Adaptation”. With the adjective principling, the seldom heard present
participle counterpart to principled,1 I had in mind just to showcase how Korean
phonology is again figuring in prominently to major theoretical issues of the day. I did
something like this before in a different venue and on different issues (Iverson 2002),
but it bears repeating today that the sound system of Korean is pivotal in helping to
establish what the principles are that govern the phonologies of languages in general.
2. The influence of orthography. The Perceptual Assimilation approach has
roots in the psycholinguistic work of Catherine Best and her colleagues (e.g., Best &
Strange 1992; Best, McRoberts & Goodell 2001), which in fact coined the acronym
PAM, for Perceptual Assimilation Model. Applied to loanword phonology, this general
approach is both straightforward and successful: minimal modifications are made to
source language forms to bring them into conformity with the pronunciation
requirements of the recipient language. For example, the word banana has been
introduced in many languages (a 16th century loan presumably from Portuguese or
Spanish via Mande [West African]), but it always comes out something like [bənænə] or
[banana], never [pʰɪkəl] or [kʰjukəmbɚ].
(1) banana → [b̥ənænə] (English), [banana] (Japanese); *[pʰɪkəl], *[kʰjukəmbɚ]
[panana], alternating with [p’anana] (Korean); *[pənɛnə], *[p’ənɛnə]
The hypothesis of ‘mimimal modification’ in the phonetic adaptation of loanwords
is thus widely supported, perhaps trivially so, but, as always, the interesting cases
revolve around departures from predicted results. Pronounced as [panana], the word
banana in Korean today seems unremarkable inasmuch as its initial stop, lax [p], is the
phonetically closest approximation that Korean has to an initial lenis bilabial stop such
as occurs in English (Iverson & Lee 2004). If the word first came into Korean directly
from Portuguese or Spanish [banana], on the other hand, or even indirectly via Japanese
[banana], its alternate (and presumably older) Koreanization as [p’anana] with an initial
tense stop and the vowel [a] throughout would also constitute a minimal departure from
the source pronunciation in view of the substitutions that Korean phonology imposes. It
would not be expected by the measure of minimal modification, however, that the
pronunciation [panana] could be a borrowing from English [b̥ənænə], because Korean
does have vowel phonemes close to English [ə] and [æ] — if English were the source,
As my colleague Joe Salmons points out, the word principling is recognized in the Oxford English
Dictionary Online as having been in existence since 1649, with the meaning, “To be the principle, source,
or basis of; to give rise to, originate.”
1
3
the word in Korean should be [pənɛnə], since this is the closest Korean phonetic and
phonemic approximation to English [b̥̥ənænə]. If English nonetheless is the source, on
the other hand, then presumably it would be Korean awareness of the English spelling
of the word with the letter a throughout that determines the vowels in the Korean
renditions.
I suppose that banana has been a word of Korean for longer than the language has
been susceptible to the influences of English. But there are other words of clearly
English origin whose vowels can be explained only as a spelling pronunciation of the
English orthographic representation. An interesting instance of this effect that was
recently brought to my attention is the Koreanized form of the word coffee [kʰɔfi].
Korean has no /f/ phoneme, of course, for which it regularly substitutes native aspirated
/pʰ/, so the modern pronunciation [kʰəpʰi] is the phonetically closest approximation.
But an earlier form of the word, now out of fashion, is [kʰopʰi], with the vowel [o]
conforming to the English spelling of the word with the letter o. I am informed that
[kʰopʰi] is also the spelling-influenced pronunciation of an earlier Korean form of
English copy [kʰapi], now rendered truer to the source pronunciation as [kʰapʰi].
(2) coffee [kʰɔfi] →
copy [kʰapi] →
lobby [labi] →
radio [ɹeɪdio] →
Swordfish [sɔɹdfɪʃ]
[kʰopʰi] → [kʰəpʰi]
[kʰopʰi] → [kʰapʰi]
[ɾobi]
(*[ɾabi])
[ɾadio] (*[ɾɛidio])
→ [sɨwədɨpʰiʃwi] (*[sədɨpʰiʃwi], *[sodɨpʰiʃwi])
Similarly, the word lobby [labi] has been Koreanized with [o], as [ɾobi], even
though the equally possible *[ɾabi] would be a phonetically closer approximation,
whereas radio [ɹeɪdio] comes in as [ɾadio] (the variant [nadio] with initial [n] is now
antiquated) rather than the closer possibility, *[ɾɛɪdio]. Equally if not more telling of
spelling influence, and more recent, is the John Travolta film title Swordfish [sɔɹdfɪʃ]
rendered as [sɨwədɨpʰiʃwi], with phonetic expression given to the “silent” w of
orthographic Sword, i.e., a letter in the source spelling which is not pronounced at all.2
3. English fortis stops in Korean. These and many other examples show that
the spelling of English vowels (and even silent letters) rather than native phonemic
status plays a key role in how they are adapted into Korean. The extent and domain of
orthographic influence on loanword adaptation will doubtless be difficult to delimit
generally, though suggestive experiments have been designed by Vendelin &
Peperkamp (2005) with respect to English loanwords in French. But it seems clear that,
especially with vowels, Korean adaptations from English are influenced by knowledge
2
For these and other Korean examples, I am indebted to Ahrong Lee and Younghyon Heo.
4
of their native spellings. The role of source spelling has also been identified in Korean
consonantal adaptations, moreover, notably in the work of Hyunsook Kang (2003), Mira
Oh (2004), Younghyon Heo & Ahrong Lee (2005), and Shinsook Lee (2005). One case
in Korean that seems amenable to explanation via orthographic influence, but which has
been interpreted instead according to the Category Preservation model, concerns the
rendering of English voiceless or fortis stops spelled p, t, c/k. As is widely known,
these stops in English are generally heavily aspirated, and thus match up well
phonetically with (and are adapted as) the aspirated series of stops in Korean. Iverson
& Lee (2004) illustrate some substitutions for English aspirated stops in word-initial
environments, where the extent of source language aspiration is at its peak; attention
can also be drawn in the adaptations in (3) to the obviously spelling-based rendition of
the vowels:
(3) panorama [pʰænəɹæmə] → [pʰanoɾama]
tennis
[tʰɛnəs]
→ [tʰɛnis’ɨ]
camera
[kʰæməɹə] → [kʰamɛɾa]
Surprisingly, however, even voiceless stops that are unaspirated in English are
rendered in Korean as aspirated if they are spelled with p, t, c/k in English, such as the
medials in:
(4) pickle
potato
happy
[pʰɪkəl] → [pʰikʰɨl]
(*[pʰik’ɨl])
[pʰətʰeɪɾo] → [pʰotʰɛitʰo] (*[pʰotʰɛit’o])
[hæpi]
→ [hɛpʰi]
(*[hɛp’i])
The Perceptual Assimilation model would suggest that phonetically unaspirated
voiceless medial stops in English should correspond to the tense series of stops in
Korean (which are phonologically geminate, per Ahn & Iverson 2004), because these
are similarly voiceless and unaspirated; but this is not the case: English orthographic p,
t, c/k correspond to Korean aspirated stops irrespective of source language aspiration.
This is generally true of the voiceless unaspirated stops that are sourced in s-clusters as
well, as pointed out by Mira Oh (1996):
(5) stick
stop
spoon
sponge
[stɪk] →
[stap] →
[spun] →
[spʌnǰ] →
[sɨtʰik]
[sɨtʰop]
[sɨpʰun]
[sɨpʰonǰi]
(*[sɨt’ik])
(*[sɨt’op])
(*[sɨp’un])
(*[sɨp’onǰi])
school [skul] → [sɨkʰul] (*[sɨk’ul])
skate [skeɪt] → [sɨkʰɛitʰɨ] (*[sɨk’ɛitʰɨ])
5
The Category Preservation approach to loanword adaptation, by contrast, would
hold that the reason these stops from English, though unaspirated, are nonetheless
categorized as aspirates in Korean is that listeners are aware that word-internal voiceless
unaspirated stops are actually allophones of the English aspirated phonemes. This view
claims then that adaptation of the English sounds is based phonologically on English
phonemes, not phonetically on English allophones. There is an alternative explanation
for these apparent counterexamples to the Phonetic Approximation hypothesis, however,
and that is that educated Koreans, who have good knowledge of English spelling
conventions, recognize the phonemic correlates in Korean of graphemic p, t, c/k in
English. This is a claim then that, rather than processing English sounds according to
English phonology, Koreans understand that orthographic p, t, c/k in English — when
pronounced at all (psycho has no [p] either in English [saɪko] or Korean [s’aikʰo]) —
should correspond to Korean aspirated stops irrespective of their degree of aspiration in
English. The orthographic influence hypothesis thus yields the same results for the
adaptations in (3), (4) and (5) as the Category Preservation model, but other factors
suggest that it is in fact orthographic awareness, not preservation of source language
categories, that is responsible for the observed substitutions.
First, the adapted vowel in words like stop [sɨtʰop] and sponge [sɨpʰonǰi] does not
reflect the phonemic categories of the source, but rather spellings with the letter o,
whose phonemic value in English is variable (e.g., /a/ in stop, /ʌ/ in sponge).
Interestingly, the vowels of spoon and school, both rendered in Korean with /u/, are also
spelled with the letter o, but here it is doubled, indicating awareness on the part of
adapters that English orthographic oo corresponds to phonemic /u/. It thus seems clear
that awareness of vowel spelling affects the adaptation of these words into Korean, a
circumstance which suggests that the spelling of consonants in the source language can
be a determining influence as well.
Second, when orthography is known to play much less of a role, if any, the
prediction of the Perceptual Assimilation/Phonetic Approximation model seems to be
born out, with English unaspirated cluster stops matching up with Korean tense
(unaspirated) stops, not aspirated ones. This is a matter calling for further research, of
course, but some of my Korean consultants, when confronted with oral nonsense forms
having initial s+stop clusters like [stin] or [spo], give Korean pronunciations for them
with unaspirated tense stops: [sɨt’in], [sɨp’o]. By way of another anecdote, a Korean
M.A. degree student of mine — also a high school teacher of English in Korea —
recently made a substitution of this sort in explaining how Korean vowel epenthesis
works in answer to a question during her final oral examination. The word she chose to
illustrate epenthesis with was English stop [stap], with the vowel [ɨ] being introduced to
break up the initial [st] cluster; but the spontaneous pronunciation she gave was with
6
unaspirated tense [t’], not aspirated [tʰ], and with the source language-like vowel [a]
rather than spelling-influenced [o]: [sɨt’ap].
(6)
NONCE WORDS:
[stin] → [sɨt’in], not [sɨtʰin]; [spo] → [sɨp’o], not [sɨpʰo]
SPONTANEOUS: [stap] → [sɨt’ap] rather than ‘standard’ [sɨtʰop] for stop
When asked about these deviations from the ‘correct’ adaptation as [sɨtʰop], she
remarked that that pronunciation reflects how the word should be written in Korean,
whose rigorously phonemic writing system in turn influences the standard
pronunciation. But on the fly, and under the stresses of an oral examination, she gave
the pronunciation which the Perceptual Assimilation model predicts when orthography
appears not to be an influence.
A similar finding emerges in the work on American English flaps carried out by
Eun-kyung Sung (2003). Koreans regularly adapt the medial flap in words like potato
as aspirated [tʰ] even though, phonetically, it is obviously closest to the native Korean
flap sound [ɾ] that is an expression of the liquid phoneme in the language. But no one
in Korean pronounces potato as [pʰotʰɛiɾo]. Yet when the influence of spelling is
removed, as in Sung’s careful perception experiments, Korean speakers are revealed to
perceive American English flaps also as Korean flaps, i.e., as a liquid rather than a stop,
just as would be expected under the phonetic approximation model of Perceptual
Assimilation. The role of orthographic awareness, in other words, is key in
distinguishing the cases that conform to from those that conflict with the predictions of
the Perceptual Assimilation model of loanword adaptation.
4. English lenis stops in Spanish. Advocates of Category Preservation
nonetheless dispute this conclusion. In their description of the adaptation of English
stops by speakers of Mexican Spanish, for example, LaCharité & Paradis (2005)
observe that the so-called voiced stops of English, at least in initial position, are
phonetically closest to (if not indistinguishable from) the voiceless stops of Spanish. In
terms of Voice Onset Time (VOT) values relative to closure release, they report as
follows:
(7) VOT correlates of stops in Spanish vs. English (LaCharité & Paradis 2005)
Phonetic Implementation
Phonological value
voiced /b, d, g/
voiceless /p, t, k/
SPANISH
ENGLISH
-VOT (-40 to 0 msec)
+VOT (0 to 30 msec)
+VOT (0 to 30 msec)
+VOT (> 50 msec)
7
The familiar distinction between the articulation of otherwise similar stops in
Romance languages like Spanish and Germanic languages like English is thus that the
voiceless stops of Spanish are laryngeally the same as the so-called voiced stops of
English: both have very short lag VOT, i.e., they are voiceless and unaspirated. As in
Korean, these stops are subject to “passive” voicing in voice-friendly contexts, such as
medial in the word or phrase, but initially the so-called voiced stops of English are
generally as voiceless as the voiceless unaspirated stops of Spanish. Recognition of this
identity has led to a new tradition in laryngeal phonology, one that juxtaposes “voice”
languages like Spanish or Japanese (with thoroughly voiced ‘voiced’ stops but
unaspirated voiceless stop phonemes) to “aspiration” languages like English or Korean
(with voiceless unaspirated ‘voiced’ stops initially but heavily aspirated voiceless stop
phonemes). This distinction and its implications for cross-language perception have
been noted before, as, for example, in description of another English-like aspiration
language, Persian:
(8) ...Persians are apt to identify foreign voiceless consonants pronounced without
aspiration (of the Slavic of Romance type) with their native voiced rather than
voiceless consonants, for which aspiration becomes the distinctive feature. This
resembles the situation of Englishmen who interpret voiceless consonants in French
in a similar way.” (Pisowicz 1987:237)
Cued by the ground-breaking phonetic work of Chin-Wu Kim nearly forty years
ago, Iverson & Salmons (1995, 2003) (see also Iverson & Ahn 2004) developed what
has come to be called the Multiple Feature Hypothesis (or, sometimes, just Laryngeal
Realism) in order to distinguish these two language types structurally. Further tested in
first language acquisition by Kager et al. (2005) and in historical linguistics by
Honeybone (2005), the idea behind Laryngeal Realism is that the thoroughly voiced
stops of Spanish should be represented phonologically with the (privative) feature
[voice], leaving the voiceless unaspirated stops in the language laryngeally unmarked,
or neutral. By contrast, the phonemically voiceless, typically aspirated stops of English
are marked with the feature [spread glottis], leaving the so-called voiced stops in this
language unmarked or neutral. As the VOT data in (7) reveal, moreover, the voiceless
unaspirated stops of Spanish are laryngeally the same as the so-called voiced stops of
English, which in initial position are usually voiceless and unaspirated, too. To
symbolize these both simply as /p, t, k/ might lead to misidentification in that the
established phonographemic practice is for English to use the same letters (b, d, g) for
initial voiceless unaspirated stops that Spanish uses for voiced stops, and another set of
letters (p, t, c/k) for aspirated stops that Spanish uses for voiceless unaspirated stops. In
order to avoid possible confusion over the values of the phonemic symbols /p, t, k/,
Honeybone (2005) suggests that the phonetically voiceless unaspirated phonemes of
8
both languages be marked with a diacritic indicating that, despite the spellings (b, d, g
in English, p, t, c/k in Spanish), these sounds are really neither voiced nor aspirated:
/p∘, t∘, k∘/. Here, however, voiceless unaspirated stop phonemes will be represented
using either the symbols /p, t, k/ (reminiscent of orthographic p, t, k in Spanish) or those
for “devoiced stops”, /b̥, d̥, g̥/ (reminiscent of orthographic b, d, g in English). The
explicit understanding then is that there is no structural difference between these, so that
voiceless unaspirated stops in the two languages may be transcribed either as [p, t, k] or
[b̥, d̥, g̥], reflecting their differing phonographemic traditions.
Still, the articulation of initial neutral stops in aspiration languages may cluster more
at one end or the other of the range of VOT variation noted in phonetic implementation,
which is observed to run from zero to around 30 msec for the neutral stops. If the
English initial neutral stops often fall closer to the lower end of this variation than do
those in Spanish, then this slight difference is accurately reflected in symbolizing the
“more nearly voiced” English-type stops with [b̥, d̥, g̥], the “more nearly aspirated”
Spanish-type stops with [p, t, k]. Indeed, in Korean (another aspiration language), the
neutral or lax stops — though fully voiced in intervoiced contexts — are actually lightly
aspirated in initial position, falling even beyond the high end of the range of variation
for laryngeally neutral stops in English and Spanish (VOT lag for initial lax stops in
Korean averages 61 msec, according to the measurements of Silva 1992); thus these are
often transcribed as [p‘, t‘, k‘]. The voiceless stops of Japanese are often a bit more
aspirated than Spanish voiceless stops, too, but not as much as Korean initial lax stops,
and not nearly as much as Korean or English aspirated stops. Phonemically, though,
laryngeally neutral stops are structured the same, whether transcribed phonetically along
the continuum of VOT variation as [b̥, d̥, g̥], [p, t, k], or [p‘, t‘, k‘]. The phonemic
representations for Spanish (or Japanese) [p, t, k] and English [b̥, d̥, g̥] (or even Korean
[p‘, t‘, k‘]) then line up as in (9):
(9) Laryngeal features of ‘voice’ vs. ‘aspiration’ languages (Iverson & Salmons 1995)
Phonemic & Phonetic Categorization
Phonological value
voiced /b, d, g/
aspirated /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ/
neutral /p, t, k/ ~ /b̥, d̥, g̥/
Voice Languages
SPANISH, JAPANESE
[voice]
[
]
Aspiration Languages
ENGLISH, KOREAN
[spread glottis]
[
]
In view of the phonetic identity between laryngeally neutral stops in Spanish and
English, accordingly, it can be expected that Spanish speakers would perceive English
neutral “voiced” stops ([b̥, d̥, g̥]) as equivalent to Spanish “voiceless” stops ([p, t, k]) —
as indeed they do when they begin to speak English, according to other studies reported
9
on by LaCharité & Paradis (2005). But the authors also point out that, under increased
exposure to English, Spanish-speaking learners come to interpret the English neutral
stops (written b, d, g) as phonemically voiced in Spanish (also written b, d, g), even
though the English ones are phonetically equivalent to the Spanish voiceless stops in
terms of VOT relations. LaCharité & Paradis attribute this development to the Spanish
speakers’ having applied the presumed voiced-voiceless phonemic distinctions of
English, as presented in (7), to the words that they borrow from English. Examples
they cite are listed in (10) (with a diacritic ‘∘’ added to the English surface “voiced”
stops in order to indicate their actual voicelessness).
(10) Voiced stops in English loans in Mexican Spanish (LaCharité & Paradis 2005)
ENGLISH
SPANISH
PHONETIC EQUIVALENT
/b/ bar
[b̥ɑɹ]
[baɾ]
*[paɾ]
baseball
[b̥esb̥ɑl]
[besbɔl]
*[pespɔl]
/d/ dip
[d̥ɪp]
[dip]
*[tip]
darling
[d̥ɑɹlɪŋ]
[daɾlin]
*[taɾlin]
/g/ golf
[g̥ɑlf]
[gɔlf]
*[kɔlf]
gang
[g̥æŋ]
[gaɲ]
*[kaɲ]
LaCharité & Paradise emphasize that the prediction of the Perceptual Assimilation
or Phonetic Approximation model would be that these words should have been adapted
with Spanish voiceless stops, which are phonetically equivalent to the English input
stops. The Category Preservation model, by contrast, would offer a structured reason
for why these words were rendered instead with Spanish voiced stops: the English stops
were interpreted according to their (presumed) voiced phonological status in English, as
schematized in (7), not according to their voiceless phonetic reality.
If the laryngeal scheme laid out in (8) is correct, however, the Category Preservation
claim for these data is simply vacuous because the laryngeally neutral stops of English
and Spanish are phonemically as well as phonetically indistinguishable. That is, the
initial neutral stops of English (orthographic b, d, g) are represented the same as the
initial neutral stops of Spanish (orthographic p, t, c/k) in both the phonetics and the
phonology; thus the expected result under either the Category Preservation or the
Perceptual Assimilation model is adaptation of phonemically neutral, phonetically
voiceless unaspirated stops from English as phonemically neutral, phonetically voiceless
unaspirated stops in Spanish. Yet this is not the result which obtains among Mexicans
“with increased exposure to English”.
10
(11) Neutral stops in English loans in Mexican Spanish (revision of (10), per (9))
ENGLISH
SPANISH
PHONETIC/EMIC EQUIVALENT
/b̥/ bar
[b̥ɑɹ]
[baɾ]
*[paɾ]
baseball
[b̥esb̥ɑl]
[besbɔl]
*[pespɔl]
/d̥/ dip
[d̥ɪp]
[dip]
*[tip]
darling
[d̥ɑɹlɪŋ]
[daɾlin]
*[taɾlin]
/g̥/ golf
[g̥ɑlf]
[gɔlf]
*[kɔlf]
gang
[g̥æŋ]
[gaɲ]
*[kaɲ]
In short, neither model under consideration accounts for the observed adaptations
among these Spanish speakers who have had increased exposure to English. But with
that increased exposure comes, it appears, an increased awareness of the graphemic
correspondences between the spelling traditions of the two languages — specifically,
that the phonemically voiced stops of Spanish line up orthographically with the
phonemically neutral ones of English. This represents the learning of a sound/symbol
correspondence, however, not a phonetic approximation or a phonemic category
preservation.
5. English /s/ in Korean. The adaptation of English /s/ in words that are
borrowed into Korean presents another interesting perceptual match-up because Korean
contrasts two types of voiceless strident alveolar fricatives: lax [s], which is often
described as having a breathy or aspirated quality, as might be represented by [sʰ]
(Iverson 1983), and tense [s’], which is produced with the glottal constriction
characteristic of the tense series of obstruents in the language (Cho et al. 2002). Either
of these fricatives, depending on context, may serve as the rendition of English /s/.
Specifically, as Soohee Kim (1999) has shown, English words are borrowed
consistently with tense [s’] when the fricative is not in a cluster in the source language,
whereas the result generally is lax [s] when the source fricative does form part of a
consonant cluster. Some examples she cites are listed in (12) (S. Kim 1999:13).
(12) English source words with /s/
(av. 133 ms in clusters, 170 ms elsewhere)
a. slump, smog, snack, spar, skate
b. test, toast, postcard, disk, mask
c. salary man, ceramic, single, size
d. gas, bus, peace, news, juice, DOS
Adapted Korean fricative
Lax
Lax
Tense
Tense
[s]
[s]
[s’]
[s’]
In experimental work, Soohee Kim found that the duration of English /s/ in a
consonant cluster was substantially less than it is when before or after a vowel.
Hypothesizing that Koreans are sensitive to this durational difference, she observed that
11
the phonetically shorter fricative (average 133 ms) in English clusters is consistently
adapted as lax but the phonetically longer fricative in English singletons (average 170
ms) is adapted as tense. Her studies on the adaptation of English /s/ did not consider
Korean tense [s’] to be a phonological geminate, but its period of turbulence or frication
generally is longer than that of lax [s] — albeit insignificantly so in initial position,
according to Hyunkee Ahn (1999a:69) (199.0 ms for [s’], 194.1 ms for [s]), but
significantly so elsewhere, per Kim & Curtis (2002) and Cho et al. (2002).
Independently, it has been argued again recently (S.-C. Ahn & Iverson 2004) that
Korean phonetically tense consonants indeed do form phonological geminates, based in
part on the fact that the closure duration of tense obstruents in Korean overall is
considerably longer than that of lax and aspirated ones (for the stops, 207 ms vs. 145
ms and 146 ms, per H. Ahn 1999b:30). This durational difference between lax and
tense consonants appears to play a determining role in the adaptation of English /s/:
when phonetically shorter, English [s] is perceived in Korean as lax or simplex /s/, but
when phonetically longer it is perceived as tense [s’], which phonologically is geminate
/ss/.
Further support for the key role played by the duration of turbulence in adaptation
of English /s/ has been adduced in recent experimental work by Hyunsook Kang (2005).
First, manipulating the length of closure durations among medial stops in Korean, Kang
found that her subjects perceive Korean stops as either lax or tense depending on how
long the closure durations are maintained:
(13) Specifically, when the closure durations of tense stops in word-medial,
intervocalic positions are shortened, these stops are perceived as lax; conversely,
when the closure durations of lax stops in word-medial, intervocalic positions are
lengthened, these stops are mostly perceived as tense. (Hyunsook Kang 2005:4)
This observation confirms the geminate analysis of Korean tense stops, and, by
extension, the tense fricative as well, as length of course is a common (if not the only)
expression of geminate status. Kang also found that, inversely co-varying with the
length of the consonant, the duration of a preceding vowel affects the identification of
the Korean fricative, too, such that a longer vowel results in perception of a lax /s/,
whereas a longer duration of turbulence results in perception of a tense or geminate /ss/.
As Kang points out, the correlation between vowel brevity and consonant length is
familiar from the phonetics of English, a stress-timed language, thus its discovery in
stress-neutral Korean was perhaps not expected. Yet when length is realized more in
the fricative and less in the vowel, the Korean perception is of a tense fricative, whereas
when length is manifested more in the vowel and less in the fricative, the perception is
of a lax, simplex fricative. This underscores the direct perceptual association between
12
phonetic duration and phonemic length, with longer periods of turbulence preceded by
shorter vocalic intervals triggering the perception of a tense (geminate) fricative.
Word-initially, by contrast, consonantal durations are difficult to distinguish, and to
measure. In fact, in other languages with initial geminates (cf. Davis 1999), the primary
indicator of geminate status is the elevation of pitch in the following vowel, as first
reported by Abramson (1992) for Pattani Malay. Apparently, the pressure build-up
associated with an increased period of oral constriction results in stiffening of the vocal
folds during the articulation of an initial geminate, with the result that the F0, or pitch,
in the following vowel is raised. Just this effect has been noted following the tense
consonants of Korean, too, as H. Kang (2005) reports and S.-C. Ahn & Iverson (2004)
survey. The higher pitch in a vowel following Korean initial tense consonants, where
durational differences are less prominent, is thus a natural, expected manifestation of
their status as phonological geminates, and indeed seems to be the primary acoustic cue
to their identification there (H. Kang 2005).
The idea that Korean tense [s’] is phonologically geminate /ss/ is thus broadly
supported, and in turn makes understandable the distinctions that Koreans make
between two kinds of phonetic [s] in words that are borrowed from English, which has
but one kind of /s/ phoneme: phonetically short [s] in English is borrowed as lax /s/
because that fricative is phonemically short in Korean, whereas phonetically long [s] in
English is adapted as tense /ss/ because the tense fricative in Korean is phonemically
long, i.e., geminate. Like other loanword adapters, then, Koreans process phonetic
structures of the source language according to the closest phonemic categories in their
native language.
One challenge to the view laid out here about the connection between the phonetic
duration of the allophones of English /s/ and their phonemic categorization in Korean
has been raised by Davis & M. Cho (2005), who maintain that the correlation Soohee
Kim observed is not robust. They note specifically that, though English /s/ generally is
rendered as lax in Korean when sourced in a cluster, this is not the case with source
words containing a final cluster of sonorant consonant plus /s/. In particular, they point
out that Kim was troubled by the adaptation of words like [tɛns’ɨ] ‘dance’ or [pʰols’ɨ]
‘false’, which have the tense fricative despite deriving from a cluster in the source
language.
(14) Korean adaptation of final sonorant plus /s/ clusters
a. dance [dæns] → [tɛns’ɨ] (/tɛnssɨ/)
b. false [fɔls] → [pʰols’ɨ] (/pʰolssɨ/)
Kim did not measure durations in these particular sequences, however, but merely
surmised that English /s/ should also be phonetically short in clusters of sonorant
consonant+/s/, as it is in clusters of /s/+sonorant consonant or obstruent. But if the
13
duration of English /s/ following a tautosyllabic sonorant consonant is not as
abbreviated as it is in other clusters, then /s/ in that context would follow the same
general pattern of adaptation that Kim had identified. In fact, in his comprehensive
acoustic study of English /s/ over a full range of environments, Klatt (1974) found that
/s/ is shorter by 40% in clusters with a following stop (an [s] that Koreans adapt as lax),
but shorter by only 15% in clusters with a following sonorant consonant or stop (an [s]
which Koreans adapt as tense). In other words, it is not so much that English /s/ is
short when in a cluster, but that it is short specifically when it occurs as the first
element in the cluster.
(15) If [s] is followed by a plosive in a two-element cluster, the [s] duration is
shortened to 60% of the value [of prevocalic [s]]. If [s] is preceded by a nasal or
plosive, the [s] duration is shortened to 85%. (Klatt 1974:60)
Other data show that English /s/ is substantially abbreviated before a tautosyllabic
sonorant consonant (as in snap, slip), too, not just before a plosive (spit, step); but the
degree of shortening of /s/ following a sonorant consonant (dance, false) or plosive
(matrix) is much less. It would appear, then, that Koreans adapt English /s/ following a
sonorant consonant as tense [s’] (/ss/) because it is above the threshold of brevity that
marks the lax fricative in Korean, and in any case is appreciably longer than English
preconsonantal [s], which they adapt as lax.
All of these facts and observations support the analysis of the Korean tense fricative
phonologically as geminate /ss/, in the manner of S.-C. Ahn & Iverson (2004), and
indicate that Korean listeners are attuned to length variations in English fricative
articulations even though these are subphonemic in English. As differences in
consonantal length are contrastive in Korean, then, at least on this analysis, it is
understandable why English allophonic durational differences should be apprehended in
the process of loanword adaptation. This perception holds even when the length effects
of phonological geminate structure are deflected to another acoustic parameter, as in the
realization of initial geminate status chiefly through the raising of fundamental
frequency in a following vowel rather than through consonantal duration. Consistent
with the Perceptual Assimilation model of loanword adaptation, then, the phonetic
structures of the English source language in these cases are interpreted according to the
phonemic categories of the Korean recipient language.
Still, some evidence suggests that adaptation is based not just on phonetics, but also
on awareness of spelling, or, more specifically, awareness of phonographemic
correspondences. Koreans appear to “know” that English words spelled with p, t, c/k
should correspond to aspirated stops irrespective of the degree of aspiration, if any, of
the sounds represented by these letters in English. On occasion, even letters which are
spelled but not pronounced in English are nonetheless adapted as if they were
14
pronounced, as in the case of the silent w in Swordfish listed in (2) and repeated now in
(16).
(16) a. Swordfish [sɔɹdfɪʃ] → [sɨwədɨpʰiʃwi] (*[s’ɨwədɨpʰiʃwi])
b. sword = soared = [sɔɹd]
Of special interest in this adaptation is not only the interpolated [w] of [sɨwədɨ] for
sword, but also the lax rather than tense fricative at the beginning of the word. As the
phonetic input from English is [sɔɹd] (homophonous with soared), one expects the
fricative to be adapted as tense (*[s’ɨwədɨ]), parallel to the treatment of other prevocalic
instances of /s/ in the source language. Instead, the fricative is adapted as lax as if there
really were phonetic expression of the orthographic w in this exceptional English word.
Since native speakers of (standard) English do not have [w] in their pronunciation of
sword, its appearance in the Korean adaptation must be due to the influence of English
spelling; this, in turn, implies that the selection of a lax /s/ rather than tense (geminate)
/ss/ in this word cannot have been based on the brevity of the fricative in the source
language pronunciation, because the fricative of sword is just as long phonetically as
that of soared. Instead, it appears that there is recognition of an English orthographic
correspondence with Korean phonological structure: English graphemic sC = Korean
phonemic /sVC/, while English sV = Korean /ssV/.
(17) Orthographic Correspondence:
English graphemic sC = Korean phonemic /sVC/, English sV = Korean /ssV/
The correspondence itself is based on phonetics-to-phonology match-ups elsewhere,
as exemplified in (12). Yet it is clear that the Korean adaptation of sword as [sɨwədɨ] is
not a direct perception of the English phonetic input [sɔɹd], but rather of the English
orthographic representation sword interpreted according to learned patterns of
phonographemic correspondence.
6. Conclusion. A fitting conclusion to this discussion on the role that
orthographic correspondence may play in loanword phonology resides in two other
adaptations in Korean that are mystifying from the point of view of either Category
Preservation or Perceptual Assimilation: one is the name of the bakery chain with
branches throughout Korea, Paris Baguette, the other is the pronunciation of the English
loanword truck.
The bakery name is from French, of course, and apparently not mediated by English,
as evidenced by the absence of [s] in the pronunciation of Paris (French [paʁi], Korean
[pʰaɾi]). But as French is a voice language, like Spanish, one expects the adaptation of
the initial voiceless unaspirated stop from the source pronunciation to be to the Korean
15
tense stop, as is usually the case with voiceless unaspirated input stops from the
Romance languages (e.g., [k’aɾɨpʰu] ‘Carrefour’ or [t’u] in Tous les Jours, another
bakery chain; Iverson & Lee 2004). The Korean rendition of a tense [t’] in Baguette
follows this pattern, perhaps buttressed by the French spelling with a double tt, and the
two voiced stops in this word are also adapted according to expectation, as lax (with
medial /k/ automatically voicing to [g]). But the surprise is the aspirated [pʰ] in Paris,
because, in French, the stop in this word (and all others) is unaspirated. The alternate
Korean pronunciation of this word, [p’aɾi] (/ppaLi/) with a tense initial, is the expected
adaptation, yet this is not the pronunciation found in the name of the bakery chain, Paris
Baguette. One suspects the influence of English orthographic correspondence here, too,
even though the source is clearly French, probably because English is far and away the
dominant donor of loanwords in Korean today. If so, then this is a case in which
Korean phonemicization of English orthography is applied even to a non-English word.
(18) a. Paris Baguette (French) [paʁi bagɛtə] → [pʰaɾi pagɛt’ɨ]
b. truck (English) /tʰɹʌk/: [tʃ̫ɹ̥ʌk] ~ [č̫ɹ̥ʌk] → [čʰuɾək], later [tʰɨɾək]
The second case, brought to my attention by Sang-Cheol Ahn, is the introduction of
the English word truck into Korean with an initial affricate, as [čʰuɾək]. Though largely
out of fashion now, this pronunciation seems to have come into the language during the
Korean War era, presumably via oral contact with American soldiers rather than
through a written medium. My own pronunciation of this source word (and of others in
English with an initial /tʰɹ/ cluster) is very much like that early Korean adaptation, in
fact, with fricative release of the initial stop deriving from the turbulent nature of the
aspiration as it tightly transitions into the retroflex approximant. In addition, my lips
are protruded or rounded for the articulation of the affricate before the following rhotic
approximant. Thus, my pronunciation of /tʰɹʌk/ as could just as well be symbolized as
[tʃ̫ɹ̥ʌk] or [č̫ɹ̥ʌk], which, under the Perceptual Assimilation model, would account for its
phonemicization in Korean with an initial affricate as well as for the labiality of the
rounded epenthetic vowel [u] rather than the usual [ɨ]. The form this word takes in
Korean today, though, is not [čʰuɾək], but rather [tʰɨɾək], a change in the pronunciation
which again points to the role of orthography. Specifically, as discussed above in
connection with the words in (5), educated Koreans appear to interpret the English
grapheme t as corresponding to the Korean phoneme /tʰ/ across-the-board, irrespective
of whether the English pronunciation makes a closer fit phonetically with a different
phoneme in Korean; and the default high back unrounded epenthetic vowel is used to
break up the cluster of imported consonants here ([ɨ] rather than [u]), there being no
rounding discernable in the source spelling of graphemic tr as there is in the source
pronunciation of phonemic /tʰɹ/. This duality of influences, phonetic and orthographic,
16
has also been identified in the emergence of several loanword doublets in Japanese, as
described by Smith (2005).
In general, however, the cases reviewed in this paper fall into place under the
Perceptual Assimilation model of loanword adaptation, with source language phonetic
structures organizing into the closest recipient language phonemic categories.
Deviations from that pathway appear to be controlled by the adapter’s awareness of
source language spelling conventions and their correspondences to recipient language
phonemes rather than to knowledge of source language phonology per se.
Schematically, the two identified influences on loanword adaptation — which often are
contradictory — lay out as in the synthesis presented in (19). Together, the varied
interpretations of acoustic and graphemic form in the cases discussed here highlight
once again the centrality of Korean in deciding leading theoretical issues in the study of
sound structure. But just where the boundary falls between sound-based and graphemebased adaptation remains still to be determined, likely on a case-by-case basis.
(19) Schematic of Loanword Adaptation
Source Language Word
↙
↘
Acoustic Form Graphemic Form
(if heard)
(if known)
↓
↓
Encoding into Recipient Language
Phonological Categories
↓
Adapted Loanword
17
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