2008年度第10回AA研フォーラム

Abstract： This lecture reports the major results of a study of the sound correspondences in a corpus of c. 1,300 Japanese loanwords taken from the Ulimal Ewen Sacen (Kim 1997). In comparison to Japanese, Korean has a richer inventory of vowels and consonants. Consequently, for a given Japanese sound, Korean typically offers several choices. It is remarkable that the same choice is made more or less uniformly across the corpus, suggesting that a phonological calculation is being made. What is the nature of this calculation? After briefly sketching the models of loanword adaptation that have been proposed in the recent literature, we discuss four adaptation patterns and their bearing on these questions: (1) the mapping of Japanese /u/ to Korean /u/ vs. /i/; (ii) the adaptation of vowel length, (iii) the coda nasal, (iv) the Japanese voiced vs. voiceless contrast in the face of the famous three-way lax, tense, aspirated contrast of Korean.

*collaborators: Chiyuki Ito (TUFS) and Yoonjung Kang (U Toronto)