A Reassessment of the Adaptation of West Old Turkic Loanwords in Hungarian: New Findings and Perspectives

The adaptation of West Old Turkic (WOT) loanwords into Hungarian is reevaluated in this work, with an emphasis on phonetic and phonological changes that occur during borrowing and the adaptation processes. Building on the previous work that measured phonetic distances using an improved Levenshtein distance algorithm, this study includes dataset adjustments and theoretical understanding of the different processes of borrowing and adaptation. The study separates the more significant rule-based phonological adaptations that have been seen throughout time from the more subtle phonetic changes that occurred during the initial borrowing stage. These results demonstrate the systematic phonological tendencies of L1 in absorbing foreign lexical items, illustrating the interaction between contact dynamics and language evolution. Additionally, the study reveals recurrent patterns of adaptation and the alteration of certain phonemes, providing insight into the linguistic processes behind the nativization of loanwords. This study adds to broader discussions on phonological adaptation by resolving previous morpho-phonological inconsistencies and integrating improved data to offer a more thorough understanding of the phonetic and phonological dynamics in the adaptation of WOT loanwords in Hungarian.