Gouskova, Maria. 2001. Falling sonority onsets, loanwords, and Syllable Contact. In Andronis, Mary, Christopher Ball, Heidi Elston and Sylvain Neuvel, eds. CLS 37: The Main Session. Papers from the 37th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Vol. 1. Chicago: CLS. pp. 175-186.
When phonotactically restrictive languages borrow words with complex onset clusters, they often treat s-obstruent clusters differently from all others. In s-obstruent clusters, a vowel is inserted at the edge: cf. English ‘school’ and Hindi [iskul]. In rising sonority clusters, the vowel is inserted into the cluster, cf. English ‘fruit’ Hindi [firut] (Broselow 1999). I propose that the pattern is an effect of Syllable Contact-—the preference for sonority to fall across a syllable boundary (Murray and Vennemann 1983). I provide evidence from Russian loanwords into Kyrgyz, which show the split epenthesis pattern with clusters that violate sonority sequencing but do not start with [s].