Not as you R: Adapting the French rhotic into Arabic and Berber
Mohamed Lahrouchi
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004422
January 2019
This article examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Arabic and Berber. In loanwords borrowed from French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Arabic and Berber have phonemic /?/ and /?/. We argue that this phenomenon is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors. We show that Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic speakers, including monolinguals, are able to identify the French r as a sonorant, based on their native phonology, where many co-occurrence restrictions are analyzed in terms of sonority-sensitive dependency relations between the most sonorous segment and its neighboring segments.