Epenthesis in Transliteration of Mandarin Loanword:An Optimality-Theoretical Account

This paper looks into the transliteration of Mandarin loanwords of English person names from both phonological and perceptual perspectives and concludes that such strategies as epenthesis, deletion and feature change are employed to satisfy Mandarin phonology, with epenthesis being the major strategy, and that epenthesis involves consonant assimilation, vowel harmony and default vowel. Epenthesis strategy follows "preserving maximally"principle, and inserted vowel types reflect human beings'perceptual ability. Optimality theory incorporates the two aspects and schematically accounts for them through the interactionbetween faithfulness and markedness constraints.