ABSTRACT
This chapter explains a full-scale observation of Mandarin loanwords from corpus data. It discusses the adaptation of consonants, vowels, and suprasegmentals. The consonants of Mandarin and English can be classified by three features: the place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing/aspiration. The chapter aims to observe the general aspect of adaptation of Mandarin loanwords originating from English, in order to find the rules that control the mapping between the phonemes of both languages, and to provide the backgrounds for the factors that affect the adaptation of Mandarin loanwords. English phonemes that are replaced by the Mandarin phonemes of the same phonological categories will be considered as a faithful mapping. The chapter also discusses all about how the inputs that are not allowed in the native Mandarin phonology are changed to adapt to Mandarin phonotactics and explains of preservation and deletion in the adaptation of Mandarin loanwords and describes the coda consonants.
