• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.264-269
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• 2008

When English disyllabic words are borrowed into the Korean language, the loanwords tend to have extra syllables. The purpose of this paper is to find the syllable increase conditions in loanword adaptation and further to provide an algorithm to predict the syllable numbers of English disyllabic loanwords. There are three syllable augmentation conditions. The presence of diphthongs and the existence of consonant clusters guarantee the increase of the syllable numbers in the English loanwords. Further, the quality of the final consonant (and the preceding vowel) sometimes trigger the increase of the syllable numbers. Based on the conditions, an algorithm composed of 4 rules are proposed in order to predict the number of syllables in English disyllabic loanwords.