借入語に関する音韻論的一考察 : 日本語になった英語

要旨

As the civilization develops cultural exchange takes place increasingly. When one culture is influenced by another there is found a great deal of linguistic borrowing interesting to observe. Japan has borrowed much from English, especially after World War II. The assumption of the present paper is that the linguistic change in borrowed forms can theoretically be predicted by a systematic comparison of the structure of the two languages-the borrowing and the borrowed. This follows the socalled 'Principle of Transfer' I mentioned in previous papers. My present purpose is to abstract some types of transfer concerning the change from the selected data. As the materials 3000 words were selected from news papers, weekly magazines, native speakers of Japanese with 'frequency' as a criterion. Dictionaries were frequently used to examine the generality of them. The whole description is focussed on the phonological level. Observations were made on the following levels. A. Sound Features 1. Consonants 2. Vowels 3. Diphthongs and Triphthongs 4. Phonotactics B. Prosodic Features 1. Syllable Structure 2. Voicing 3. Stress and Pitch 4. h-prosody (Aspiration) 5. w-prosody (Labialization and Velarization) Though some problems are still left to be solved, the attempt proves: 1. Abstraction of types of transfer is possible 2. Predictions towards future borrowings can be made 3. This kind of abstractions will be of help to the teaching of the two languages.