Loan Adaptation of Korean Obstruents into English

The purpose of this study is to investigate the principles for loanword adaptation by analysing the Taekwondo vocabularies and Korean food names borrowed into English. Three results were found from data analysis. Firstly, phonetic realizations of Korean stops and fricatives determine the corresponding loan sounds in English. Such phonetic adaptation reflects how borrowers perceive source sounds. Secondly, the Taekwondo loanwords in English adapted early 1950’s exhibit the preference for phonetic similarity between the source and borrowing sounds. But relatively recently adapted Korean food name loanwords are conditioned by Romanization regulations in Korea. Thirdly, the diachronic change in mapping Korean obstruents to the corresponding loan sounds in English shows that the principles for loanword adaptation can change over time. These results suggest that phonetic similarity is mostly effective in early stage of loanword adaptation(Y. Kang, 2010). They also show that variable loan sounds are regularized by various factors including Romanization system of the source language.