SegBo: A database of borrowed sounds in the world's languages

Eitan Grossman, Elad Eisen, Dmitry Nikolaev, Steven Moran

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Phonological segment borrowing is a process through which languages acquire new contrastive speech sounds as the result of borrowing new words from other languages. Despite the fact that phonological segment borrowing is documented in many of the world's languages, to date there has been no large-scale quantitative study of the phenomenon. In this paper, we present SEGBO, a novel cross-linguistic database of borrowed phonological segments. We describe our data aggregation pipeline and the resulting language sample. We also present two short case studies based on the database. The first deals with the impact of large colonial languages on the sound systems of the world's languages; the second deals with universals of borrowing in the domain of rhotic consonants.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Frederic Bechet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Pages5316-5322
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9791095546344
StatePublished - 2020
Event12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020 - Marseille, France
Duration: 11 May 202016 May 2020

Publication series

NameLREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings

Conference

Conference12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityMarseille
Period11/05/2016/05/20

Keywords

  • Language contact
  • Linguistic database
  • Phonology
  • Typology

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Education
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Linguistics and Language

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