INA VISHOGRADSKA

Sofía University (BULGARY)

The role of vowel harmony in the loanword adaptation in Hungarian

Fonética y Fonología

The present work examines the implementation of a phonological regulation, namely - vowel harmony - in the process of acquiring borrowings from English and various Slavic languages into Hungarian.

As it is known, Hungarian language employs [+/-back] vowel harmony. This influences strongly the morphology of the language as well, thus providing Hungarian for the process of suffixation with a large palette of allophones, each supplementing the required [+back], or respectively its [-back] counterpart vowel in the suffix, so that it would match the [a back]-ness of the preceding vowel(s).

It is expected that each new word entering Hungarian will undergo an adjustment, relevant for the phonotactics of the language. Naturally, “foreign” vowels, non-existent in the Hungarian vowel paradigm, are substituted with such, present in the language. One of the aspects of our investigation is to trace and define the regulation determining the choice of the “Hungarian” vowel. What is of more interest for determining/unveiling the role of vowel harmony in the process of adaptation of the loanwords, however, is revealed through another characteristic feature of Hungarian: the language does not tolerate consonant clusters, especially word-initially. Therefore, an epenthetic vowel is inserted, to break up the accumulation of two, three (and even four!) consonants.

By examining the nature of the chosen epenthetic vowel and giving the rules governing the choice we attempt to show the degree of vowel harmony involvement in the overall shaping of the loanwords in Hungarian.




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