The Medial and Final (CCC) Consonant Clusters in the Loanwords of Turkish: Is It an Illusion?

Abstract

Known as a language which strictly follows its phonotactic constraints showing low tolerance for the exceptions, Turkish employs a variety of phonological processes in the adaptation process of the foreign words into the language so as to make the phonologically improper loan words obey with the phonotactic and phonological constraints of the language. As one of these constraints, Turkish forbids the adjacency of three consonants (CCC) in the simplex forms given that CCC implies morphological complexity on the phonological string. However, there are still a number of foreign words with medial and final CCC clusters adapted to Turkish such as bandrol ‘banderol’, semptom ‘symptom’, portföy ‘portfolio’ and kuvartz ‘quartz’. Based on these observations, the aim of the present study is to investigate the appearance of CCC clusters in Turkish words, which are adapted to Turkish from foreign languages. In this regard, we claim that CCC in simplex words are only an illusion and there is no violation of phonotactic constraints. Accordingly, we argue that Turkish has three basic strategies in order to avoid CCC clusters while adapting the foreign words. As the first strategy, Turkish prefers the realization of a vowel following the initial CC as in /bandɯrol/ (i). The second strategy Turkish applies is to adapt the word which has a CCC cluster with only CC: e.g. /semtom/ and /kuvarz/ (ii). As the third option, certain adapted words with CCC clusters are stored in the mental lexicon as if they had a complex morphological structure port-föy (iii). We will give an account for these strategies in the light of government, licensing and constituent structure analyses.