Language Contacts: Phonetic Aspects

Abstract

Language contact is one of the main factors causing dramatic impact on a language system. Linguistic analysis of ancient extant manuscripts of comparable content such as early translations of the Bible into various languages gives distinct possibilities to reveal the changes that languages show in the process of interaction. The impact of such contacts on the sound systems can be inferred on the basis of comparison of the traditional methods of representing native linguistic units and the methods of representing in written form the so-called borrowed grammatical or lexical linguistic units. Unfortunately, this sort of evidence is utterly rare and should be regarded as an exception presenting only scanty information. In fact, the research into phonetic consequences of language contact became possible only with the appearance of reliable methods of speech sound registration.