Lenition

Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. The name lenition appears especially, but not exclusively, in the context of Celtic languages such as Welsh and Irish, in which it is pervasive. The phenomenon of consonant gradation in Samic-Baltic-Finnic languages is also lenition.

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Lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from Latin lenis, as in the root of 'lenient'), and it refers to the change of a consonant considered 'strong' into one considered 'weak' (fortis → lenis). The criteria for deciding whether a consonant is one or the other kind are variable, but in general, the scale goes like this: voiceless stops (/p t k/) → voiced stops (/b d g/) → voiced fricatives (/v ? ɣ/). Also, geminate consonants go down one step in the gemination hierarchy; for example in Finnish, geminates become simple consonants while retaining voicing or voicelessness (e.g. katto → katon, dubbaan → dubata). It is also possible for entire consonant clusters to undergo lenition, as in , where voiceless clusters become voiced, e.g. itke- → idg?n.

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If a language has nothing but voiceless stops, other sounds are encountered, as in Finnish, where fricatives are represented by chronemes, approximants, taps or even trills. For example, Pohjanmaa has a synchronic lenition of an alveolar stop into an alveolar trill t → r, and the same phoneme 't' also undergoes assibilation te → si, e.g. root vete- → vesi and vere-, where vete- is the stem of the strong form, vesi is the nominative, and vere- is the stem of the weak form.

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Synchronical lenition happens in the Celtic languages, where it is conditioned by grammatical rules (for example, in Scottish Gaelic the initial consonant of a noun is lenited by the masculine 3rd person possessive eg 'm?thair' "mother" - 'a mh?thair' "his mother" /m/->/v/, but not the feminine possessive, 'a m?thair' "her mother"). Diachronical lenition is found, for example, in the change from Latin into Spanish, where word-medial intervocalic voiceless stops (/p t k/) changed into their voiced counterparts (vita → vida, caput → cabo, caecus → ciego). This same development is found in Celtic languages where non-geminate intervocalic consonants became subject to lenition and were converted into fricatives, or voiceless stops became voiced in (Welsh, Cornish and Breton).

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In Celtic, the phenomenon of intervocalic lenition even extended across word boundaries, and in cases where a word ended in a vowel, the initial consonant of the following word was affected. This explains the rise of grammaticalised initial consonant mutation in modern Celtic languages. In the earlier example from Scottish Gaelic, the word for "his" historically was vowel-final, and the word for "her" was not. Even though most words lost their final syllables (as in French from Latin), the mutation effect on the initial of the next word remained since these mutations had already become embodied in the language as grammatical rules.

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Consonant: :See also consonance in music....

Mutation: :This article is about mutation in biology, for other meanings see: mutation (disambiguation)....

Language: A language is a system of expression and communication. Individual languages use sound, gesture, and other means to express and communicate concepts, emotions, ideas, and thoughts. Expressions of a language are analysable into words, whose meanings are usually conventional. The word "language" is ...