Phonologically motivated orthographic variation in Modern Uyghur: the voicing of h

Abstract

In this paper, I present data from three corpora of written Uyghur showing that the conventionally voiceless letter h, which occurs in words of Arab-Persian etymology, sometimes patterns as voiced in stem-final environments where it is a trigger for morphophonemic voicing assimilation in a following segment. Results indicate that when authors omit root-final h from the spelling, they tend to use voiced suffix-initial consonants, but when the h is written there is considerable variation both between and within authors and lexemes. No other phonological or functional factors were identified as being strong predictors of the variation. I interpret this as reflecting a probabilistic process of lenition or deletion of root-final /h/ in the adaptation of these loanwords that has diffused at different rates across the lexicon for different speakers.