Old Basque had */χ/, not /h/

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julen Manterola ◽  
José Ignacio Hualde
Keyword(s):  
Sound Change ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Bilingual Speakers

Abstract The sound change from Latin /f/ to Old Spanish and Gascon /h/ has often been attributed to stratal influence from Basque. The motivation would be that Old Basque lacked /f/, and instead had a phoneme /h/, with which bilingual speakers replaced it when speaking in Romance. However, this hypothesis presents several difficulties. Most importantly, Navarrese Romance preserves Latin /f/, and in Basque itself, /f/ is adapted as /b/ in loanwords from Latin and Romance, not as /h/. Here we will argue that Old Basque had neither /f/ nor /h/. Instead, modern Basque /h/ derives from older */χ/. Medieval data will play an important role in establishing this. This hypothesis explains a number of morphophonological alternations, as well as some puzzling aspects in the treatment of aspiration in Romance borrowings, and it also makes it more difficult to hold to the stratal hypothesis for the Romance change /f/ > /h/.

VOT merger in Heritage Korean in Toronto

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoonjung Kang ◽  
Naomi Nagy
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Frequency ◽  
Sex Difference ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Korean Speakers ◽  
Internal Variation

AbstractKorean has a typologically unusual three-way laryngeal contrast in voiceless stops among aspirated, lenis, and fortis stops. Seoul Korean is undergoing a female-led sound change in which aspirated stops and lenis stops are merging in voice onset time (VOT) and are better distinguished by the F0 (fundamental frequency) of the following vowel than by their VOT, in younger speakers' speech. This paper compares the VOT pattern of Homeland (Seoul) and Heritage (Toronto) Korean speakers and finds that the same change is in progress in both. However, in the heritage variety, younger speakers do not advance the change, unlike their Seoul counterparts. Rather they have leveled off or are perhaps reversing the change, and there is very little sex difference among the younger heritage speakers' patterns. We consider possible accounts of the differences between the Seoul and Toronto patterns, building our understanding of how language-internal variation operates in bilingual speakers, a topic that has received relatively less attention in the variationist literature.

Intervocalic lenition and word-boundary effects

Diachronica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ignacio Hualde
Keyword(s):  
Sound Change ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Boundary Effects ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Explanatory Account ◽  
History Of

The lenition of intervocalic consonants is typically phonologized in sound change only within word domains. At first blush, this morphological restriction might seem to contradict the Neogrammarian hypothesis of exclusively phonetic conditioning in sound change. In this paper I examine the weakening of intervocalic voiced stops/affricates in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish. Comparison with Old Spanish shows that in the native lexicon intervocalic lenition has affected only word-internal consonants. Even consonants following a prefix boundary remain unaffected. I argue that, at the time of the expulsion of the Spanish Jews, the language already had the spirantization process, at least in incipient form. This process, which continues to operate across the board in Mainstream Spanish, became restricted at the word level in Judeo-Spanish. This interpretation, consistent with the Neogrammarian hypothesis, is the only one that offers an explanatory account and is supported by the evidence from other similar developments in the history of the Romance languages and with results from recent acoustic studies on incipient or optional lenition processes.

Multidisciplinary Evidence to Treat Bilingual Individuals with Aphasia

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
José G. Centeno
Keyword(s):  
Stroke Rehabilitation ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Treatment Strategies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intervention Strategies ◽  
Steady Increase ◽  
Clinical Procedures ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Aphasic Clients

Abstract The steady increase in linguistic and cultural diversity in the country, including the number of bilingual speakers, has been predicted to continue. Minorities are expected to be the majority by 2042. Strokes, the third leading cause of death and the leading cause of long-term disability in the U.S., are quite prevalent in racial and ethnic minorities, so population estimates underscore the imperative need to develop valid clinical procedures to serve the predicted increase in linguistically and culturally diverse bilingual adults with aphasia in post-stroke rehabilitation. Bilingualism is a complex phenomenon that interconnects culture, cognition, and language; thus, as aphasia is a social phenomenon, treatment of bilingual aphasic persons would benefit from conceptual frameworks that exploit the culture-cognition-language interaction in ways that maximize both linguistic and communicative improvement leading to social re-adaptation. This paper discusses a multidisciplinary evidence-based approach to develop ecologically-valid treatment strategies for bilingual aphasic individuals. Content aims to spark practitioners' interest to explore conceptually broad intervention strategies beyond strictly linguistic domains that would facilitate linguistic gains, communicative interactions, and social functioning. This paper largely emphasizes Spanish-English individuals in the United States. Practitioners, however, are advised to adapt the proposed principles to the unique backgrounds of other bilingual aphasic clients.

Children's Nonword Repetition Tasks and English Language Learners

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 73-79
Author(s):  
Sara C. Steele ◽  
Deborah A. Hwa-Froelich
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
English Language ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
Adopted Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Internationally Adopted Children ◽  
English Speaking

Nonword repetition performance has been shown to differentiate monolingual English-speaking children with language impairment (LI) from typically developing children. These tasks have been administered to monolingual speakers of different languages and to simultaneous and sequential bilingual English Language Learners (ELLs) with mixed results. This article includes a review of the nonword repetition performance of monolingual and bilingual speakers and of internationally adopted children. Clinical implications for administration and interpretation of nonword repetition task outcomes are included.

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