Loanword Phonemes
Borrowed words can carry foreign phonemes into a language. If the host script has no native symbol for the imported sound, spelling must approximate or improvise rather than map speech cleanly.
A sound used in an Indian language may have no place in Devanagari at all: Persian carried it into local speech through the Mughals, leaving speakers with a phoneme their inherited script was not designed to represent.
E1Words cross borders with their sounds attached
Borrowing does not stop at vocabulary. A foreign word can preserve a sound from its source language, expanding the host language’s spoken inventory without automatically expanding its alphabet. The mismatch is structural: speech has gained a distinction, while writing still reflects the older sound system. Spelling must then reuse a nearby letter, modify an existing sign, or add some other warning that ordinary pronunciation rules are insufficient. This is Lossy Encoding Across Mismatched Alphabets at the level of a single phoneme.
E1Not every unusual pronunciation is imported
A script–sound mismatch alone does not prove that a phoneme arrived through borrowing. Pronunciations can also change within a language, and spelling can preserve older forms; establishing a loanword phoneme requires evidence about the sound’s historical source and route of transmission.
Trace the sound before correcting the spelling
When a borrowed word seems awkwardly spelled, isolate the troublesome sound, check whether the script has a dedicated symbol for it, and then trace the word’s donor language. Treat the spelling as evidence of a mapping problem, not immediately as an error by the speaker.
Episodes that teach this
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Indian English is Weird & Britishers are to Blame - Schwa Deletion & Sound Pronunciations - FutureIQ
· explained at 8:20
257,831 views
"that sound doesn't exist in Devanagari, it doesn't exist in Indian languages — it has come to us from Persian, the Mughals brought it."