earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the loan adaptation pattern for Japanese fricatives/affricates in Korean, based on the laryngeal classification (Iverson and Salmons 1995). Numerous words have been borrowed from Japanese over the last century and many of them are still in frequent use. Considering the consonantal systems of the two languages, it has been argued that certain phonetic factors such as VOT play a crucial role in the loan adaption (Ahn and Lee 2007). There occur, however, various mismatches in the adaptation of fricatives/affricates as the laryngeal neutralization occurs only in an initial position. That is, the voiceless fricative is exempt from the strong constraint requiring initial laryngeal neutralization. On the contrary, the Japanese voiced fricative /z/ is realized as an affricate /c/, not as a fricative. To be more specific, we first argue that initial laryngeal neutralization reflects the lack of voicing contrast in Korean and the Japanese voicing contrast cannot be perceived during loan adaptation. Second, we explain how the frication/affrication escapes from the constraint for initial neutralization. For this analysis, using the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1995), we provide several constraints responsible for the exceptional behavior of the fricatives/affricates. Third, we show that Korean speakers do not perceive the detailed morphological information in Japanese, that is, the so-called “Rendaku(連濁)” process, as the initial voicing of the second compound word is ignored in loan adaptation. In addition, we show that the voiceless fricatives/affricates in Anglo-Japanese words are adopted differently from those directly borrowed from English.