earticle

영어

This paper deals with English borrowings from foreign languages like Danish, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese and observes that the English loans prefer the selection of [æ] to that of [a] or [ɑ], other things being equal. The observation poses a challenge to the well-held view that [a] and [ɑ] are perceptually less marked than [æ]. It is predicted that the perception-based markedness would prefer [a] or [ɑ] to [æ] in loanword adaptation. On the other
hand, this paper also shows that some identifiable cases betray the aforementioned tendency of changing the source vowel [a] or [ɑ] into the vowel [æ] in the process of loanword adaptation. These two conflicting situations are discussed in this paper and explained by falling back on
grammatical constraints within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT, Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). (Seoul National University)