Document Type : Original Article
Author
Department of English- Faculty of Literature and Humanities- Shahrekord University
Abstract
Sound substitution is a process whereby a phoneme in a loanword is replaced by its closest phone in the borrowing language. English and Arabic share short vowels // and // which are absent in Persian. This comparative study aimed at explaining how these vowels are substituted in Persian within the framework of optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004). The findings of this research indicate that the short vowels // and // in English loanwords are replaced by the long vowels [i] and [u] respectively because they are the closest vowels to // and //. However, they change to mid, short vowels [e] and [o] respectively in Arabic loanwords due to Persian orthography. Therefore, this process could not be explained using an analysis that was solely phonological. Accordingly, the substitution of // and // in Arabic loanwords was analysed using orthographic constraints which have access to graphematical information. This comparative study presents arguments in favor of different constraint rankings which cause the occurances of these processes. This comparative study presents arguments in favor of different constraint rankings which cause the occurances of these processes.
Keywords
- sound substitution
- pronunciation of English loan words
- pronunciation of Arabic loanwords
- short vowels
- orthographic constraints
Main Subjects
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