• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.38
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• pp.405-431
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• 2015

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to decide pronunciation of loanwords in Korean language. There has not been a regulation for pronunciation of loanwords in Korean language. Even the dictionary published by the government does not provide any information about the pronunciation of loanwords. In this paper, some actual solutions are suggested for the pronunciation of loanwords. Korean language has Regulations of Standard Korean, Korean Orthography, Regulations on Hangeul Transcriptions on Loanwords and Pronunciation Methods of Standard Korean. These language standards could help to decide pronunciation of loanwords. Some pronunciations which could not be regulated by them must be presented in the standard pronunciation dictionary. For example, glottalization rule of 's' in many loanwords could be presented in the description of each loanword in the dictionary. However the pronunciation of loanwords must be similar to the spelling. If various pronunciations are allowed to one spelling, then people will be so confused by the discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling of loanwords.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.185-208
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• 2017

This study is for investigating strategy of associating loanwords to original words of Korean language learners. Loanwords have often been thought as easily learnable because the knowledge of the original word is assumed to be helpful in discovering the meaning. But there is much phonological, morphological and semantic transforming in accepting original words in Korean, and therefore, it is not easy to connect Korean loanwords to the original words. In this study, the awareness of loanwords and competence of associating Korean loanwords to the original words of advanced Korean language learners from China are investigated. As a result, the awareness of loanwords is remarkably lower than the awareness of non-loanwords. And, the competence of association also was very low with 17.9% of successful association. This means the learners have difficulty in inferring the meaning of loanwords by connecting that to original words.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.139-149
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• 2015

This paper aims to analyze pronunciation variations of loanwords produced by Korean and improve the performance of pronunciation modeling of loanwords in Korean by using syllable-based segmentation and phonological knowledge. The loanword text corpus used for our experiment consists of 14.5k words extracted from the frequently used words in set-top box, music, and point-of-interest (POI) domains. At first, pronunciations of loanwords in Korean are obtained by manual transcriptions, which are used as target pronunciations. The target pronunciations are compared with the standard pronunciation using confusion matrices for analysis of pronunciation variation patterns of loanwords. Based on the confusion matrices, three salient pronunciation variations of loanwords are identified such as tensification of fricative [s] and derounding of rounded vowel [ɥi] and [$w{\varepsilon}$]. In addition, a syllable-based segmentation method considering phonological knowledge is proposed for loanword pronunciation modeling. Performance of the baseline and the proposed method is measured using phone error rate (PER)/word error rate (WER) and F-score at various context spans. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline. We also observe that performance degrades when training and test sets come from different domains, which implies that loanword pronunciations are influenced by data domains. It is noteworthy that pronunciation modeling for loanwords is enhanced by reflecting phonological knowledge. The loanword pronunciation modeling in Korean proposed in this paper can be used for automatic speech recognition of application interface such as navigation systems and set-top boxes and for computer-assisted pronunciation training for Korean learners of English.

• 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.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.251-256
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• 2005

When English monosyllabic words are adapted to the Korean language, the loanwords tend to carry extra syllables. The purpose of this paper is to find the syllable augmentation conditions in loanword adaptation and further to provide an algorithm to predict the syllable numbers of English monosylabic loanwords. Three syllable augmentation conditions are found as follows: 1) the existence of diphthong, 2) the existence of consonant clusters, and 3) the quality of the final consonant (and the preceding vowel). Based on these three conditions, an algorithm to predict the syllable number of English monosyllabic loanwords are proposed as three rules applied iteratively with ordering. In addition, the applications of the algorithm to data are given.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.421-430
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• 2021

It is necessary to pay attention to the appearance of word-initial glottalization among social classes. The higher the academic ability, the more formal it is, the more likely it is to avoid word-initial glottalization due to the psychological factors that are close to the English pronunciation. The purpose of this study is to prove and clarify this through experimental research and the Praat voice analysis program. In previous discussions on word-initial glottalization, there have been various discussions such as strengthening expressions, the conclusion of competition of modern society, Korean historical analysis, differences in Korean and English phonetics, and attempts to regularize the pronunciation of loanwords. In this paper, it was revealed that the higher the academic ability, the weaker the pronunciation of loanwords word-initial glottalization appears in formal and formal situations, by using experimental research and voice analysis program Praat. The presence or absence of pronunciation of the initial specification of loanwords acts as a psychological base for expressing one's status and hierarchy.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.95-102
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• 2004

This paper proposes a method of segmenting compound nouns which include unregistered nouns into a correct combination of unit nouns using characteristics of person's names, loanwords, and location names. Korean person's name is generally composed of 3 syllables, only relatively small number of syllables is used as last names, and the second and the third syllables combination is somewhat restrictive. Also many person's names appear with clue words in compound nouns. Most loanwords have one or more syllables which cannot appear in Korean words, or have sequences of syllables different from usual Korean words. Location names are generally used with clue words designating districts in compound nouns. Use of above characteristics to analyze compound nouns not only makes segmentation more accurate, helps natural language systems use semantic categories of those unregistered nouns. Experimental results show that the precision of our method is approximately 98% on average. The precision of human names and loanwords recognition is about 94% and about 92% respectively.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.31
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• pp.287-308
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• 2013

Russian language tends to be quite open to borrowing. In Russian it has been for a long time the conventional way of expanding the lexicon, accepting many words from adjacent languages, including Church Slavic. In the contemporary Russian English has been the main source for loanwords. There are several linguistic factors for lexical borrowing: 1. the necessity of denominating new facts, phenomena or concepts, 2. the necessity of differentiating concepts, 3. the necessity of specializing new concepts, 4. the introduction of new international terms, 5. the increase of periphrastic expressions, 6. the needs for the more elegant and modern words. These factors have caused borrowing to enlarge the component of the lexicon and phrasal expressions, but excessive use of foreign words has brought about negative effects such as linguistic pollution. Some borrowed words are assimilated without serious conflicts, but other words undergo semantic changes in confrontation to existing words of similar meanings. These types of semantic changes comprise total change of meaning, reduction of semantic scale and extension of meaning. Semantic changes are caused by linguistic factors such as lexical conflict with existing words or by socio-culural factors such as misunderstanding of foreign words. And extension of meaning shows two types: qualitative extension and quantitative extension. The first means extending the semantic scope of a borrowed word and the latter - increasing the number of its sememe. In contemporary Russian language we can witness two productive phenomena: qualitative extension by socio-cultural factors, in which words with negative nuances are changed into those with positive ones and professional terms become common words, losing their professional meanings. On the other hand, by quantative extension some loanwords change their concrete meanings into abstract ones. In such cases loanwords acquire the additional meanings of abstractness, putting aside their original concrete meanings as the basic. On the contrary, the qualitative extension of adding the special meaning to general words or giving the concrete meaning to abstract words is not productive. And it is rarely witnessed that words of positive nuances are negatively used. It is considered that such cases are partly restricted in the spoken language or the jargon. Such phenomena may happen by the incomplete understanding of English words.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.86-87
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• 2000

In this paper, we discuss why two different surface forms appear in loanwords for English and German /${\int}$/ In Korean, a vowel is inserted into loanwords if a consonant cannot be properly syllabified. Therefore, /${\int}$/ in some positions of loanwords trigger vowel insertion. Interestingly, /${\int}$/s in the onset cluster of English and German words were borrowed in Korean as Iful with the inserted vowel [u] whereas If Is in the coda position of English and German words were borrowed as Ifil with the inserted vowel [i]. For example, 'shrimp' is adopted as [${\int}urimphi$] whereas 'rush' is adopted as [$ra{\int}i$]. In this paper, we attempt to find out the phonetic reason for the distribution of the surface forms of /${\int}$/. We assume that since the formant frequency of [i] is higher than that of [u], the peak frequency of /${\int}$/ with the surface form of [${\int}$i] in loanwords may be higher than that of /${\int}$/ with the surface form of [${\int}u$]. We also assume that duration may be another factor for the distribution of [${\int}i$] and [${\int}u$]. Since /${\int}$/ and /u/ use lip rounding whereas /i/ doesn't, the duration for [${\int}i$] might be longer than that of [${\int}u$]. German supports our assumption. /${\int}$/ in the onset cluster is longer than /${\int}$/ in the coda position. It also has higher peak frequency than that of /${\int}$/ in the coda position. In loanwords, ${\int}$ in the onset cluster is borrowed as [${\int}u$] as in Spiegel whereas /${\int}$/ in the coda position is borrowed as [${\int}i$] as in Bosch. English, however, does not support our assumption. Peak frequency of [${\int}$] depends on the preceding vowel, not on its position in the syllable structure. If the preceding vowel is front, then the peak freuency of the following of the following /${\int}$/ is high but if the preceding vowel is back, than the peak frequency of the following /${\int}$/ is low. The peak frequency of /${\int}$/ in the onset cluster seems to be in between. As we assumed, however, the duration of /${\int}$/ in the coda position is longer than of /${\int}$/ in the onset cluster. With the mixed results, we question whether Koreans really hear two different xounds for /${\int}$/ in English words. For the future experiment, we would like to perform the perception tet for /${\int}$/ in English words.

• MALSORI
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• no.38
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• pp.41-70
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• 1999

Researches on perception have, in recent years, been increasingly popular as a means of accounting for cross-linguistic sound patterns (Ohala, 1992; Hemming, 1995; Jun, 1995; Steriade, 1997 among others). In loanword phonology, Silverman(1990, 1992) argues that words from a source language are scanned through the perceptual level and that the features perceived by a speaker are stored in the input to be processed according to his/her native language's phonological constraints. The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of Silverman's proposal by examining the correlation between perception and production of Korean learners of English. We specifically focussed on perception and production of stop release by contrasting English loanwords with English words loarned through education to see if there were any significant differences. The results showed that there was no substantive correlation between the Korean speakers' perception of the loanwords pronounced by English speakers and their own production of those words. In the case of English words, however, the Korean speakers' production was closely related with their perception, although some inter-speaker variations were observed. With Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolenksy, 1993) as a theoretical framework of analysis, it was shown that the theory is a useful means of implementing a phonetics-phonology interface and relating perceptual processes with speech production. Specifically, under the assumption that loanwords with [t]~[t/sup h/] alternation (e.g.,'cut') are originally borrowed into Korean as two different input forms, all the alternations could be straightforwardly accounted for in terms of a unified ranking of constraints.