The unnatural /Cju/ (< foreign /Cy/) sequence in Russian loanwords: A problem for the perceptual view

LaCharité and Paradis (2000, 2005) and Paradis and LaCharité (1997, 2001, in press), who support the “phonological view”, have already brought numerous arguments against the “perceptual view” as a general explanation for sound adaptation in lexical loanwords. This article offers a new type of evidence against the perceptual view: the fact that, for phonological reasons, the adaptation of a phoneme of the source language yields in the borrowing language (L1) an unnatural phonotactic sequence. This sequence is /Cju/, where a consonant is palatalized before a back vowel (/u/). Yet palatalization systematically occurs before front vowels in Russian, not back vowels. The /Cju/ sequence in Russian results overwhelmingly from the adaptation of the foreign sequence /Cy/ in loanwords from French, German and various languages of the Turkish family. We argue that this adaptation does not support the perceptual view, which maintains that loanword adaptations are due to L1 “deafness” to L2 foreign material and the fact that L1 borrowers reconstruct what is natural to their ear when they are in L1 mode.