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I'm curious why many English words that are borrowed into Japanese which have
the "ca" sound as in "can" or "canvas" end up with that being mapped to キャ:

  * キャンバス (canvas)
  * キャビネット (cabinet)
  * キャンセル (cancel)
  * キャンピング (camping)
  * キャメラ (camera)
  * ...

Gya also:

  * ギャラリー (gallery)
  * ギャラクシー (galaxy)

also, not at the start of a word:

  * スキャン (scan)
  * スキャンダル (scandal)

(and why is 缶 かん rather than きゃん).

The kya sound doesn't resemble the original in any major English dialects.

It's not hard to pick up the intuition for it, but is there a linguistic
explanation?

Does this choice help to avoid some ambiguity with native morphemes,
essentially flagging these words as being loanwords?

There don't seem to be very many native words that start with kya; a large
number of them are compounds of 客, so these prefixes do seem to occupy a
sparsely populated space.
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2013-10-11T22:48:41.663
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2013-10-11T23:48:50.990
2013-10-11T23:15:30.957
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question
loanwords
The process behind キャ in loanwords from English
In more linguisticky terms, you might say that **velar stops before /æ/ are
sometimes palatalized** in loans from English. Why?

We can find our answer in [_Adaptation and Transmission in Japanese Loanword
Phonology_](http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/13947/1/Crawford,%20Clifford.pdf),
Clifford James Crawford's doctoral dissertation, in section 2.3.3
"Palatalization of velars before /æ/". Quoted below:

> [T]here is an allophonic variation in English between velars with a
> relatively front place of articulation, as in _key_ , that occur before
> front vowels, and velars with a relatively back place of articulation, as in
> _coo_ (Keating & Lahiri 1993). **Fronted velars are thus likely to be
> perceived as palatalized by Japanese listeners, given their similarity in
> articulation** (Akamatsu 1997).12 _(emphasis added)_

So when these words were borrowed, it's likely that native speakers of
Japanese **did** perceive a resemblance to the original, even though you, as a
native speaker of English, do not.

Why does this occur only before /æ/? Crawford continues:

> [O]nly velars before /æ/ actually can be palatalized; the other possible
> source sequences here (/ki, kɪ, ke, kɛ/) are always adapted with a
> (phonologically) plain velar instead. This is because Japanese phonology
> does not make a palatalization contrast before front vowels (Ito & Mester
> 1995).13

Crawford also attempts to address the question of why palatalization occurs
only some of the time. He shows relationships between the date of borrowing
and likelihood, and he also shows that words with "similar enough" cognates in
other languages available for borrowing tend not to exhibit palatalization.
These two factors combined, he says, give us a relatively strong way to
predict whether velar stops before /æ/ will end up palatalized in Japanese.
For details, please see his dissertation, linked above.
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2013-10-11T23:48:50.990
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2013-10-11T23:48:50.990
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answer