Tonal rules for English loan words in Cantonese

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Abstract
It is common knowledge that when one language borrows from another, the borrower often would incorporate the loan words into its phonological system by substituting ‘alien’ sounds by those from its own stock, breaking up consonant clusters to conform to its syllable structure and so on. In general it is not impossible to predict fairly accurately what a loan word would sound like in a language if one is familiar with the phonological systems of the lender and borrower. However, syllable structure and segments are just part of the picture. Other considerations like stress and tone would also be important if one is dealing with a stress language or a tone lauguage. The aim of this paper is to examine English loan forms in Cantonese in order to discover what happens when words from a stress language like English are borrowed into a tone language like Cantonese.

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