On the 25th of July, Sandra posted a brilliant blogpost about different patterns that can emerge when loan words are integrated into native phonological systems. The next step is then to incorporate the new loan words into the native grammatical system, which likewise can give rise to interesting patterns. Tagalog, an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines, can illustrate this.
Reduplication, the process in which a word or part of a word is repeated to encode some grammatical function, is a common morphological process in Tagalog. For Tagalog verbs, the first consonant and the first vowel is reduplicated to encode that an event will take place in the future. The verb sulat (‘write’) takes the form susulat, (‘will write’), repeating the initial [su]-sequence. Similarly, the verb basa (‘read’) takes the form babasa (‘will read’), repeating the [ba]-sequence.
As the attentive reader will have noticed, both examples begin with a single consonant. Indeed, native Tagalog words can at most begin with a single consonant, similar to the pattern discussed by Sandra for Finnish. However, loan words in Tagalog do not always follow this constraint, as can be illustrated with the loan word trak (from English ‘truck’, same meaning). This is also the case for verbs borrowed into the language, as with trabaho (from Spanish ‘trabajar’, meaning ‘to work’).
The question is then, how is this verb reduplicated? The pattern that we find is tatrabaho (will work), where the [r] is not reduplicated. The reduplicant (the segments that were reduplicated) follow the basic phonological patterns of the language, not the pattern found in the Base (the stem being reduplicated). As such, trabaho is a good examples of how the integration of loan words can give rise to new and interesting grammatical patterns!