Not as you R: Adapting the French rhotic into Berber
Mohamed Lahrouchi
This article examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Berber. In loanwords borrowed from French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Berber has phonemic /ʁ/ and /χ/. It is argued that this phenomenon is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors. It is shown that Tashlhiyt Berber speakers, including monolinguals, are able to identify the French r as a sonorant, based on their native phonology, where many co-occurrence restrictions are analyzed in terms of sonority-sensitive dependency relations between the most sonorous segment and its neighboring segments.
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Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
3.4.1 Monolingual speakers

Let us consider the following data, collected from Berber monolinguals living in France.

(6) French Berber i. #__ ʁwɑ̃ ɾuwa ‘Rouen’ ʁazwaʁ rrˤezˤwɑn ‘razor’ ʁɥɛj ɾwaj ‘Rueil’ ʁadjo rradju ‘radio’ ʁuʒ rruʒ ‘red, red wine’ ʁeʒim rriʒim ‘diet’ ii. __# nɑ̃tɛʁ nɑntˤɛɾˤ ‘Nanterre’ anjɛʁ anjɛɾˤ ‘Asnières’ plasvɔltɛʁ blˤɑsˤbuntiɾ ‘Voltaire square’ gaʁdynɔʁ gaɾdinoɾˤ ‘North station’ desɛʁ ddisiɾ ‘dessert, fruits’ kaχtdəseʒuʁ kɑrˤtˤsiʒur ‘residence permit’ iii. V__V peʁifeʁik lpiɾifiɾik ‘ringroad’ tuʁɛfɛl ttuɾifil ‘the Eiffel Tower’ nymeʁo nnimiɾu ‘number’ ekyʁi lkuɾi ‘riding stable’ sekyʁite ssikuɾiti ‘security, safety officers’ asyʁɑ̃s lɑsˤoɾˤɑnsˤ ‘insurance’ iv. #C__ bʁokoli lbɾokoli ‘broccoli’ bʁavo bɾavu ‘cheer’ tχɑ̃kil tɾankil ‘calm’ tχamwe tˤɾˤɑmwaj ‘tramway’ tχavopyblik tˤɾˤɑboblik ‘public works’ fχɑ̃s fɾˤɑnsˤɑ ‘France’ v. …C__ ɑ̃bʁeaʒ lambɾjaʒ ‘cutch’ tɛ̃bʁ ttanbɾ ‘stamp’ adʁɛs ladɾis ‘the address’ metχo metˤɾˤo ‘subway’ etχɑ̃ʒe etˤɾˤanʒi ‘foreigner’ matχikyl matɾikul ‘registration number’ vi. …__C aʁʒɑ̃ lɑɾˤʒa ‘money’ kuʁbəvwa kɾbubba ‘Courbevoie’ ebɛʁʒəmɑ̃ ebeɾʒma ‘housing’ gaʁdynɔʁ gaɾdinoɾˤ ‘North station’ pɛʁmisjɔ̃ bɾmsjun ‘permission’ kyχkyma lkoɾˤkoma ‘turmeric’

These data were elicited from two uneducated native speakers of Berber, who arrived in France in the early 1970’s and settled in the Parisian region. They were 65 and 72 years old when they were interviewed in 2017. In addition to data gathered from their spontaneous speech, they were given a list of items, mainly place names and proper names, which they often use when speaking Berber inside their community in France. They were told each item in French and they were asked to pronounce it in Berber.

The data are sorted into six classes, depending on whether the rhotic is word-initial (6i), word-final (6ii), intervocalic (6iii), part of a word-initial (6iv) or word-medial complex onsets (6v), or part of a heterosyllabic cluster (6vi). They clearly show that the French rhotic is systematically adapted in Berber as a coronal tap (or as a trill when geminated), regardless not only of its phonetic nature but also of its position within the word and the syllable.

The data also challenge the idea according to which orthography may influence the adaptation process, as the source and the borrowing languages do not use the same alphabet (cf. Vendelin & Peperkamp 2006; Hamann & Colombo 2017 on the role of orthography in loanword adaptation). On top of that, Berber owes much of its vitality to millennia of oral tradition, with little to no influence of written sources. The Tifinagh alphabet, officially introduced at school in the last two decades in Morocco, is rarely used by Berber speakers, let alone illiterates whose data are central to the analysis advocated here.

One may well ask how Berber speakers interpret the French uvular systematically as a coronal although they do not have access to the phonology of the source language. One possible explanation lies in their native phonology, which may allow them to identify the French rhotic as the analogue of the coronal tap in their native language. The next subsection addresses the phonotactics of Tashlhiyt Berber roots, which come into play in the adaptation of the French rhotic.

3.4.2 The obstruent-sonorant pattern in Tashlhiyt Berber roots

In a relatively recent study (Lahrouchi 2010), it has been shown that the segmental composition of verbal consonantal roots in Tashlhiyt Berber obeys structural and distributional constraints, the foremost being:

(7) Each root contains at least one sonorant, immediately preceded by an obstruent.

The examples in (8) illustrate this constraint. They are grouped into four sets, where O stands for an obstruent and S for a sonorant.

(8) √OOS √OSO gzm ‘cut’ fɾd ‘nibble’ bsɾ ‘spread out’ kɾz ‘plough’ bdɾ ‘mention’ χɾb ‘scratch’ kʃm ‘enter’ smd ‘add’ kbu ‘pierce’ ħlb ‘eat (liquid food)’ √SOS √OSS mgɾ ‘reap’ knu ‘lean’ lkm ‘arrive’ bɾi ‘scratch’ nkɾ ‘stand up’ χmɾ ‘ferment’ ɾgl ‘knock’ ʁml ‘mold’ ntl ‘hide’ gɾu ‘pick up’

Of the roots listed in the aforementioned study, 73% belong to these classes. 82% of them contain at least one sonorant preceded by an obstruent. Counterexamples include roots that are entirely made of obstruents (e.g. bdg ‘be wet’, bzg ‘swell’, zdʁ ‘inhabit’), and roots where the only sonorant occurs in the initial position (e.g. ɾkz ‘dance’, lqʒ ‘crush’, ɾqs ‘jump’).

Based on this type of constraints, Lahrouchi (2010) has proposed that Tashlhiyt Berber triconsonantal roots display a binary-branching head-complement structure, where the obstruent is the head and the following sonorant its complement. This structure is hierarchical, rendered by means of a tree diagram analogous to those that represent syllabic and syntactic constituencies. The roots represented in (9) illustrate the proposal (the head position is indicated by the dot at the end of the branch).

(9)

The head and the complement share the same node in the tree. The remaining segment, linked to a higher node, is an adjunct that occurs to the left or the right of the head-complement pair.

Biconsonantal roots are no exception to this trend. Half of them are of the form obstruent-sonorant (e.g. fl ‘leave’, gn ‘sleep’, gl ‘bust’). Those displaying the reverse order (sonorant-obstruent) do not exceed 25%, and behave as underlying triconsonantals (cf. Iazzi 1991; Lahrouchi 2008; 2009; 2010, among others).

One piece of evidence in favor of this analysis is provided in the imperfective stem: only roots containing an obstruent-sonorant cluster, that is, a head-complement structure, undergo gemination in the imperfective. Moreover, the segment which is geminated is the one which occurs in the head position. This allows one to distinguish between roots geminating the medial consonant (10a) and those geminating the initial one (10b). Roots lacking the head-complement structure resort to tt-prefixation in the imperfective (cf. Dell & Elmedlaoui 1985; 1988; 2002 for an alternative analysis).

(10) √ Imperfective a. kʃm kʃʃm ‘enter’ bsɾ bssɾ ‘spread out’ bdɾ bddɾ ‘mention’ kbu kbbu ‘pierce’ b. fɾd ffɾd ‘nibble’ kɾz kkɾz ‘plough’ χɾb χχɾb ‘scratch’ ħlb ħħlb ‘eat (liquid food)’

The careful reader will have noticed that branching onsets in French exhibit a similar pattern:3 they are composed precisely of an obstruent followed by a sonorant. I contend that Berber speakers, monolinguals included, employ this phonotactic patterning and adapt the French rhotic as a sonorant, that is, as a coronal tap. This is not to say, however, that the obstruent-sonorant clusters behave as complex onsets in Berber. Word-initial complex clusters are much less restricted in this language than they are in languages with genuine complex onsets. While French requires that word-initial clusters have a rising sonority profile (leaving aside sC-sequences), Berber imposes no sonority restriction on their distribution. As shown in the examples below, Berber exhibits not only #CC sequences of rising sonority (11a) but also their mirror image (11b), as well as those which have a sonority plateau (11c).

(11) a. OS kɾu ‘rent’ bɾi ‘scratch’ gnu ‘sew’ dlu ‘cover’ sli ‘touch’ b. SO ɾku ‘be dirty’ ɾbu ‘carry on the back’ ngi ‘overflow’ ldi ‘pull’ lsan ‘they wore’ c. OO kti ‘remember’ bdu ‘begin’ bgu ‘drill’ fsi ‘untie, melt’ sti ‘pick out’’

Apart from a few restrictions (a significant instance of which to be discussed below), any CC combination is possible in word initial position in Berber, regardless of the relative sonority of the consonants. According to Dell & Elmedlaoui’s syllabic model (1985; 1988; 2002), prevocalic clusters of the type in (11) are systematically parsed as heterosyllabic: The first consonant stands as a syllable on its own while the second one is syllabified in the onset position (cf. Lahrouchi 2001: 103; 2018a; Ridouane, Hermes & Hallé 2014).

I conclude that the obstruent-sonorant pattern is active at the phonological level of both Tashlhiyt Berber and French. While in the latter language it is used at the syllabic level in order to define the sonority profile of complex onsets, in Tashlhiyt Berber it underlies the organization of consonantal roots in the lexicon, assigning them a binary-branching head-complement structure, which does not necessarily correspond to their syllabic structure.

One may argue that the obstruent-sonorant pattern is valid only in verbal roots. The mechanism I propose to account for the interpretation of the French rhotic as a sonorant would then be a generalization from a pattern which applies in a subset of the lexicon. However, the notion of the root in Berber is a complex issue still under debate. Most scholars agree that the lexicon of this language consists mainly of acategorial roots which are entirely composed of consonants, ordered inalterably and bearing a general meaning (cf. Basset 1929; Cantineau 1950; Galand 1988; Chaker 1990; Taïfi 1990; Boumalk 1996; Lahrouchi 2018b). Associated with vowels to specific templates, they allow for the derivation of words of different categories: For instance, askɾz ‘plow’, amkɾaz ‘plowman’, and tajɾza ‘plowing’ share the triconsonantal root √kɾz. Likewise, gɾu ‘to pick up’, agɾaw ‘assembly’ and amgɾaw ‘picker’ share the root √gɾw. In contrast, roots which contain vowels and consonants alike almost systematically correspond to nouns: e.g. udm ‘face’, ikzin ‘pup’, and aman ‘water’ (cf. Moktadir 1989; Dell & Elmedlaoui 1991; 1992; Dell & Jebbour 1991; Bensoukas 2001; 2018).4

If the analysis advocated here is correct, then the hypothesis according to which bilinguals must phonologically adapt loanwords before monolinguals can appropriate them (Paradis & LaCharité 2001: 258) becomes unnecessary. It is sufficient to say that Berber speakers select the coronal tap in French loanwords instead of the uvular fricative based on their native phonology, where many co-occurrence restrictions can be analyzed in terms of sonority-sensitive dependency relations between the most sonorous segment in a specific domain and its neighboring segments. More specifically, they identify any French rhotic preceded by an obstruent as a sonorant, just like they do in their own language when distinguishing between verbs which resort to root-internal gemination and those which involve a geminated prefix. Then, they consistently generalize the adaptation to all other contexts where the French rhotic appears, including word-initial, medial and final position (e.g. ʁido ‘curtain’, byʁo ‘office’, baʁ ‘bar’), as well as in heterosyllabic clusters (e.g. aχk ‘arch’, aʁdwaz ‘slate-gray’).

The idea that a specific mapping driven by a specific context can be generalized to other contexts is not new. One can date it back to the neo-Bloomfieldian principle of “once a phoneme, always a phoneme”, which states that if two sounds contrast in at least one minimal pair, they are declared as phonemes and analyzed as such even in neutralizing environments. This also echoes McCarthy’s (2005) free-ride approach in morphophonemic learning. The author showed that once learners of Sanskrit have discovered that some surface [eː]s are derived by coalescence from underlying /ai/s (e.g. /tava indra/ → [taveːndra] ‘for you, Indra (voc.)’), they are able to derive from underlying /ai/s all surface [eː]s, including those for which they have no relevant alternation data. Along the same lines, Lloret & Pons-Moll (2016) argue that despite a limited number of alternations supporting the epenthetic nature of schwa before word-initial sC clusters in Catalan (e.g. [əspeɾá] ‘to expect’ ∼ [pɾospeɾá] ‘to prosper’), learners extend the pattern to all other words which lack these alternations (e.g. [əscálə] ‘stairs’, [əspɔ́t] ‘spot’).