Lenition

Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. Along with assimilation, it is one of the primary sources of the historical change of languages.

Lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from Latin lenis, the root of 'lenient'), and it refers to the change of a consonant considered 'strong' into one considered 'weak' (fortis → lenis). Common examples include spirantization or affrication (turning into an affricate or a fricative), such as → voicing or sonorization, such as ^*" target="_blank" >→ place), such as ^*" target="_blank" >→ ^*" target="_blank" >→ ^*" target="_blank" >→ [k, etc. Essentially, consonants may be lost from words, and as they are, they may pass through several stages; all the steps along the way are considered lenition.

Two common lenition scales are the "opening" type, where the articulation becomes more open with each step,

stop	affrication	spirantization	debuccalization	elision	(notes)
p	→ pf	→ f	→ h	→ (zero)	(may involve rather than ^*)
t	→ ts	→ s	→ h	→ (zero)	(may involve rather than ^*)
k	→ kx	→ x	→ h	→ (zero)

and the "sonorization" type, which involves voicing as well as opening,

stop	sonorization	spirantization	approximation	elision	(notes)
p	→ b	→ v	→	→ (zero)	(may involve and rather than ^* and )
t	→ d	→ ð	→	→ (zero)	(may involve ^* and rather than and )
k	→ g	→	→	→ (zero)

An example of historical lenition is evidenced by English-Latin cognates: Latinate pater, tenuis, canine vs. English father, thin, hound. The Latinate words preserve the original stops, which have become fricatives in the Germanic languages.

Outside of historical linguistics, the term lenition is used widely 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.

An example with geminate consonants comes from Finnish, where 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 Votic, where voiceless clusters become voiced, e.g. itke- → idgön.

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, Finnish used to have a complete set of spirantization reflexes for P, T and K. However, these were lost in favour of similar-sounding phonemes. In Pohjanmaa Finnish, /ð/ was changed into /r/, thus the dialect has a synchronic lenition of an alveolar stop into an alveolar trill t → r. Furthermore, the same phoneme 't' also undergoes assibilation te → si, e.g. root vete- → vesi and vere-. Here, vete- is the stem, vesi is its nominative, and vere- is the same stem under consonant gradation.

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 'màthair' "mother" - 'a mhàthair' "his mother" →, but not the feminine possessive, 'a màthair' "her mother"). Diachronical lenition is found, for example, in the change from Latin into Spanish, where word-medial intervocalic voiceless stops () 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).

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.

(Gaelic) Calligraphy and Typography

In late Gaelic calligraphy and traditional Irish typography, lenition is indicated by a dot over the consonant diacritic. However, since few typesetters had the requisite slug, their convention has been to suffix the letter "h" to the consonant, to signify that it is lenited. For example, "a mháthair" (as above) is a Latin alphabet rendering of "".

Fortition

A consonantal mutation in which a sound is changed from one considered 'weak' to one considered 'strong', the opposite of lenition, is called fortition. Fortition is a much rarer sound change than lenition, and is not found in many languages.

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(Gaelic) Calligraphy and Typography

Fortition

See also