Loanword adaptation in Esperanto

Abstract

This research investigated the phonological directions by which new roots are incorporated into Esperanto. Words were selected from the following magazines: Kontakto, the official magazine of the Tutmonda Esperantista Junulara Organizo (TEJO – World Esperanto Youth Organization), which was first published in 1963 and has subscribers in over 90 countries, and Esperanto, the official magazine of the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (UEA – Esperanto Universal Association), which was first released in 1905 and has readers in 115 countries, in addition to a technological terminology list (Nevelsteen, 2012) and to words not quoted in dictionaries but published in a list on the blog <http://vortaroblogo.blogspot.com.br/2009/09/nepivajvortoj-i.html>. Words were collected from 13 different languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Japanese, Komi, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Sanskrit and Swahili. The theoretical basis that guided this analysis was Loanword Phonology, mainly the works of Calabrese & Wetzels (2009), Vendelin & Peperkamp (2006), Paradis (1988), Kang (2011), Friesner (2009), Menezes (2013), Chang (2008), Kenstowicz & Suchato (2006) and Roth (1980). An analysis of the corpus showed that words can be adapted by their phonetic form as well as by their root’s orthographic form from the original language. Furthermore, we observed that long vowels were, for the most part, adapted as simple vowels; and some words are present in two synchronic variations.