Okay, I didn’t think that this would be interesting but I was talking about scanning today at my job and I was kinda surprised about the weird gap between loaned verbs.
I’ve talked on my bluesky account that the phonology of loan verbs in Indonesian can be quite confusing, but I didn’t think that there would be more to it than this. One of the case studies was “klaim” where it can exhibit weird features in the spoken language where “mengklaim” is licit (where /ŋk/ clusters are disallowed stem-externally) though I’m not sure whether there’s a constraint that ranks loaned verbs with higher IDENT-IO in Indonesian than native words, where menglaim is expected (again, not an OT-ist).
But I have discovered something more interesting: a split between the rendering of sC- clusters from English. sC clusters are—to my knowledge—very IE-coded and not seen much else, and it’s not in the native cluster list either. Probably due to the fact that it’s pretty awkward in the sonority hierarchy (I’ve heard my grandma say /sətik/ for “steak” once or twice before).
Butttt… there comes a case where sC- clusters are loaned, especially in techy terms like scan or skip. In English, these are pretty much unambiguously monosyllabic words, but in Indonesian, scan can be either [səken] or [sken] (introducing a weird morphological dimension that I’ll discuss later).
Usually, the orthography’s not changed for these recent loans in Indonesian so I’ll just stick with those unadapted terms for the rest of the blog post.
Soooo… I’ve drawn two diagrams to show this.
Where syllable count is important is with the actor voice meŋ- (it’s actually meŋ- but let’s stick to traditions) where there is an allomorph of məŋə- in monosyllabic position. Though, monosyllabic verbs are usually loaned anyway, like pel “to mop” from Dutch vel or gas “to accelerate” from English gas.
(This is kind of like English more/-er splits—I think there’s a Bert Vaux paper on this)
That is, in formal Indonesian, that is. More colloquial Indonesian has reduced it down to the single nasal N- (perhaps through Javanese influence, since Javanese has a single N-); with, of course, a ŋə- allomorph where a verb is monosyllabic.
Below is a tree that I’ve prepped for this blog post specifically.
Soooo… what is weird about this distribution? First off, I was talking to a friend of mine that I’ve scanned a document, but when typing it, I’ve realized that nycan looks odd, and that I had to change it to ngescan—which, at that time, lit up a weird lamp in my head (not quite a lightbulb, like, a cursed chandelier at best).
Right, so I realized that I’ve been saying /ɲəken/ for a while but I’ve asked my friends to produce the actor voice for me (ok a bit of an informal choice and probably not quite the best methodology) and they variably produced what I’ve been saying (weird, orthographically), or the monosyllabic equivalent /ŋəsken/.
For the record, /s/ in Indonesian is dropped before the actor voice in lieu of the palatal nasal; so sapu “sweep, broom” becomes meny-apu “AV-sweep”. This process is the same with other voiceless stops, /p t k/ with the expected Points of Articulation. (Except tʃ, which behaves weirdly, like the prescribed pronunciation—and the most is men-curi “Av-steal” instead of menuri/menyuri?).
So yeah thanks for reading my ramblings again.
