Gemination in Hungarian loanword adaptation

An interesting puzzle of Hungarian phonology is gemination in recent loanwords borrowed from English, German (and occasionally, from French). A consonant following a short stressed vowel is often geminated in the loanword, even if the consonant doubling does not have an orthographic reflex in the source word, i.e. the consonant in question is not spelt as a double letter in the source word. Unlike similar phenomena in other languages (such as Japanese, Finnish or Telugu), this is a gradient phenomenon involving considerable interand intra-speaker variation, and seemingly there is nothing in native Hungarian phonotactics that would require such a process to happen, as both singleton and geminate consonants are equally acceptable in all the contexts where loanword gemination occurs. Gemination depends on context: it never applies when the consonant is preceded by a long vowel and is most productive in monosyllables word-finally. Apart from the influence of context, the propensity of consonants to undergo gemination also varies by consonant class: voiceless consonants are more likely to be geminated in loanwords than voiced ones, which reflects universal hierarchies of geminate markedness. In this paper, we will show that loanword gemination may not be as mysterious as it seems at first sight: it is a process regulated by faithfulness (to vowel length in source words) and universal markedness (of gemination which is an important factor in native Hungarian phonotactics as well). Finally, we will present a Maximum Entropy model to account for this phenomenon.