SegBo: A Database of Borrowed Sounds in the World’s Languages

Eitan Grossman, Elad Eisen, Dmitry Nikolaev, Steven Moran


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.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.654
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5316–5322
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.654
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eitan Grossman, Elad Eisen, Dmitry Nikolaev, and Steven Moran. 2020. SegBo: A Database of Borrowed Sounds in the World’s Languages. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5316–5322, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
SegBo: A Database of Borrowed Sounds in the World’s Languages (Grossman et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.654.pdf