Phonological interference

Translations

interferenza fonologica | interférence morphologique | phonologische Interferenz

Article

Phonological interference is a type of structural interference that affects the phonemic inventory of a language. The concept is explored already by Weinreich (1953, 14-28) in his seminal work on contact linguistics, as it is, intuitively, an easy kind of contact to identify and describe. Brière (1966) presented an articulated description of the formal and psychological features of the phenomenon, and studies on modern contact scenario have been authored ever since.

Identifying phonological interference in ancient areas is made difficult by the fact that the phonetic reality of the languages that only survive in written documents can only be reconstructed in a speculative fashion. There are, however, cases of obvious areal behavior in phonology, as for instance the satem-centum areal opposition within Indo-European.

Example

Examples range from cases of local interference to hypothetical cases of larger areas of convergence.

As for the latter case, a classical example from the Anatolian area is the absence of initial /r/ in Hattian and Hurrian and in the Anatolian languages (Kammenhuber 1969, 267)) - which, however, would be more convincing if and only if a clarification of the processes that eliminated it in the different languages could be provided. Another one is the change of final /m/ to /n/ in Greek and in the languages of Anatolia (cf. Bianconi 2015, 139), which, however, is debatable as the trait emerges also in other Indo-European languages and is typologically trivial.

Cases of local interference between clearly identifiable idioms are generally less debatable. One is the assimilation of /n/ to /m/ before /p/ in Palaic, which, according to Goedegebuure (2008) could depend on contact with Hattian (Girbal 1986, 194-195). It should be noticed that the interference is not merely phonotactical, but it involves the introduction of an allophone of /b/, which makes it structurally phonological.

Hittite	Palaic	Hattian
°an-p° e.g. in:	°am-p° e.g. in:	°am-p° e.g. in:
kissan =pat	=am =pi	am-pu
thus FOCUS	him.acc CONTRAST	do-PST1SG

A less certain example of local interference regards Luwian-Hittite contact in the Late Hittite age. Words that would have contained an etymological /e/ vowel start being spelled with an /i/, probably by influence of the phonemic inventory of Luwian, which lacked the distinction. Interestingly, Yakubovich (2010: 218-231) observes that the opposite phenomenon also occurs: words with a regular /i/ are sometimes spelled with an /e/, in a form of "puristic" hypercorrection by Hittite scribes who tried to avoid the Luwianizing interference.

References

Bianconi, M. 2015. Contatti Greco-Anatolici e Sprachbund Egeo-Micrasiatico: stato della ricerca e nuove prospettive. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 2015/1, pp. 129-178. Brière, E.J. 1966, An Investigation of Phonological Interference, in Language 52, pp. 768-796 Girbal, Ch. 1986, Beiträge zur Grammatik des Hattischen, Frankfurt am Main/Bern/New York. Goedegebuure, P. 2008, Central Anatolian languages and language communities in the Colony period: A Luwian-Hattian symbiosis and the independent Hittites, in Jan G. Dercksen (ed.), Anatolia and the Jazira during the Old Assyrian period, Leiden, pp. 137-180 Kammenhuber A. 1969, Hattisch, in: Johannes Friedrich et al. (ed.), Altkleinasiatische Sprachen, Leiden/Köln, pp. 428-546. Weinreich, U. 1953. Languages in contact (Publications of the Linguistic Circle of New York 1), New York. Yakubovich, I. 2010, Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language, Leiden.