Again, towards the Borrowing-adaptation of Loan Religious Lexical Units in Svan. III

Abstract

Foreign religious lexical units hold a significant place in the lexical fund of Svan, and in the process of borrowing, these borrowed elements have undergone particularly interesting phonetic-phonological and semantic adaptation. Taking into account the various phonetic processes occurring during borrowing, and based on data from the dialects and sub-dialects of Svan, we considered it appropriate to group these lexical units into the following categories: 1. Borrowed religious lexical items that are phonetically completely unchanged and modified with phonetic nuances, 2. Roots with consonant elision in (auslaut), 3. Consonant changes in auslaut of borrowed religious lexical items, 4. Umlautized roots, 5. Phenomena of vowel length, 6. Vowel reduction, 7. Consonant and vowel changes classified by type, 8. Composites containing borrowed religious lexical items, etc., some of these issues we have already discussed in various scientific collections and papers published in session materials or submitted for printing, but this time the main goal of our work is to study the changes of consonants and vowels according to their phonological types in borrowed religious lexical items. This article discusses the borrowing-adaptation of each foreign-language religious lexical unit based on data from traditionally known dialects of Svan (Upper Bal, Lower Bal, Lashkhian, Lentekhian), as well as Cholur speech and Ushgulian-Lakhamulian sub-dialects. The observation of the extensive borrowed religious vocabulary in Svan reveals that these lexical items have undergone systematic phonetic modifications in accordance with the phonemic structure of Svan. In the borrowed religious vocabulary of Svan, the most perceptible changes by their nature are processes such as voicing, glottalization, aspiration, assimilation, affricatization-desaffricatization, etc. The instances of consonant and vowel alternations, as well as l/m/n/r (sonor) consonants, sound insertion and deletion, metathesis, etc., are quite common. Evidently, when a word is assimilated from one language into another, its phonetic structure undergoes changes influenced by various factors, one of which is the intermediary language. Furthermore, the specific pathway through which this or that word was borrowed, along with the stages of adaptation it subsequently experienced, plays a crucial role in shaping its final form.