Phonology and phonetics of loanword adaptation: Russian place names in Japanese and Korean

The goal of the paper is to test two alternative approaches to loanword adaptation. The ‘strict phonological’ hypothesis views the adaptation process as direct mapping between phonemes of the source language and phonemes of the borrowing language. The ‘strict phonetic’ hypothesis views the process as parsing the input acoustic signal and mapping it onto phonological or phonetic categories of the borrowing language. Predictions of the two approaches are examined using a corpus of Japanese and Korean adaptations of Russian place names. It is shown that patterns of adaptation involve both phonological and phonetic mappings. Different adaptation strategies are used for different phonological contrasts, as well as somewhat differently in each of the two borrowing languages