Is loanword phonology simpler? A statistical investigation

Résumé En

Loanwords are one of the main sources of information for the study of in-teractions in ancient and prehistoric contexts. Hence, distinguishing potentialloanwords from inherited words is a crucial and often controversial issue. Inthe past, scholars have deployed language-specific approaches (e.g. looking forphonotactic inconsistencies – cf. Kang 2011), but more recently, the rise ofnew computational and phylogenetic methods has led to a growing interestin the possibility to identify features and patterns that characterize loanwordscross-linguistically (Zhang, Fabri, and Nerbonne 2021; Miller et al. 2020;Nath et al. 2022). This contribution belongs to this second line of research.It stems from the anecdotal observation that, within a language, loanwords of-ten seem to pick from poorer phonemic inventories than inherited words. Inorder to investigate this intuition, we first performed a series of statistical anal-yses on the WOLD database (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009; 2021). Inparticular, we verified that loanwords tend to contain fewer rare and/or co-articulated phonemes (e.g. labial-velars and ejectives). Since the statisticaldata yielded positive results, we then built a model verifying two hypotheses fora partial explanation of this phenomenon: 1) loanwords tend to contain fewercross-linguistically rare phonemes than inherited words simply because beingcross-linguistically rare, they are less likely to be found both in the source andin the target languages, and hence more likely to be reinterpreted and replacedby more common phonemes when borrowed; 2) loanwords tend to contain fewerco-articulated phonemes because phonemes of the source words that are absentin the target languages tend to be replaced by mono-articulated phonemes moreoften than by co-articulated phonemes. This could be explained by the hypoth-esis that co-articulated phonemes are more often perceived as marked, and thatphoneme replacements tend to favor less marked phonemes. As will be discussedin the conclusions, the results we have obtained raise interesting questions andproblems that are relevant for the search of loanwords in ancient/prehistoriccontexts. Finally, we will also mention a few of the practical issues we haveencountered in our analyses, as they highlight gaps in the scholarship and pointto potential avenues for further research.