Talk:Lenition

message: The discussion of matters of Irish orthography seems out of place in an otherwise linguistic article. And this area should be dealt with properly. Welsh and Breton orthographical choices deserve a mention as the contrast between the strategies that have been adopted by modern Gaelic languages is interesting. However, these matters deserve to be dealt with somewhere, and in fact the subject of language communities' orthographical strategic choices are insightful to linguists in showing native speakers' intuitions.
: I don't think that anyone would disagree that the orthographies] deserve a separate article.  The present text was parked here pending such an article, to be written by someone who knows rather more than I do about the subject (and maybe to provoke that person into doing so!).  If you feel you could make at least a first cut, then please do so and others will improve. --Red King 23:14, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irish orthography 

message: It would be nice to have some examples of diachronic lenition in the Celtic languages, as well, in the article. FilipeS 12:43, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: More examples needed

message: Ok some suggestions please... someone keeps marking the Gaelic labials as palatalised but Gaelic doesn't have palatalised labials anymore, only a remnant glide before a back vowel. Any suggestions on how to keep that from happening? Akerbeltz 13:48, 28 January 2008 (GMT)
:Maybe a historical note to that effect in the text? And commented-out notes for editors in the chart. kwami (talk) 20:58, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: As I explained on your Talk page, I'm not saying that the change doesn't occur, only that AFAIK it is not lenition. It would be lenition if it involved loss of secondary articulation, but since you say that is not the case, you've removed its only element of 'weakening'. If you can show that change from a more marked to less marked place of articulation is considered 'lenition', for example /θ/ → /s/, then not only should we restore this, but we should add an new type of lenition to the lead, and we would need to put this in a different category from /n̪ˠ/ → /n/. kwami (talk) 11:11, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

text: It's fine as you have it now (though I reworded it somewhat). I won't bother tracking down your ref, since from your summary it would appear that it doesn't support your point. My problem was that /ɲ/ → /n/ is neither loss of secondary articulation nor increase in sonorisation. What we now have sounds good, and it may be what such authors had in mind, but it is OR on our part and we won't be able to defend it if anyone challenges it—unless we can find a ref that actually says that reduction of place markedness is considered lenition. kwami (talk) 00:57, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

text: Sounds good, and I doubt we'll be challenged in any case. kwami (talk) 18:34, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Labials

message: I agree about the strange "opening type" thing - never heard of it either. Eclipsis though, if you read the lead, is relevant though it could probably be presented better, perhaps rather than lumping it under Orthography (which should probably be Celtic orthographies or something) we need:
*Mutations in Celtic languages
**Lenition in CL
**Sonorisation in CL
**Other types in CL
**Orthographic representation in CL
Something like that anyway. Akerbeltz (talk) 15:56, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: When it comes down to it, I actually think we should keep the Celtic mutations out of this article. They have their own article. This article should be about lenition in general as a phonological phenomenon, things like intervocalic spirantization and voicing. Of the Celtic languages, only Manx really has lenition in the sense of this article, things like /"baD@/ for baddey. I'd get rid of the sections "Grammatical lenition", "Orthography", "Consonant gradation", and "Fortition", and just have links to Consonant mutation, Consonant gradation, and Fortition in the See also section. +Angr 16:06, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: They illustrate the topic nicely though. To my mind it's just a little poorly laid out but I really don't see a need for throwing it all out just because these topics have "their own page". People who come here want to get a good idea of the cross-linguistic phenomena without having to read through lots of language specific pages. Akerbeltz (talk) 17:13, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The thing is, they don't illustrate the topic nicely. They digress into what is really only a distantly related topic that happens (occasionally) to have the same name. +Angr 17:32, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: When you say the Celtic Mutations, do you mean ALL of them or just everything that's not séimhiú as such? Akerbeltz (talk) 17:37, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I mean all of them except for the (non–grammatically determined) intervocalic voicing/spirantization in Manx. Yes, historically they originated as a kind of lenition (broadly defined), but I think it's just confusing for the reader to encounter them here, at least in such detail. At most, they should be mentioned in passing as a morphosyntactic phenomenon that historically originated as a kind of lenition but isn't any more. +Angr 17:44, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

text: That's an oversimplification. Celtic mutations aren't just diachronic lenition, and sometimes they aren't lenition at all (e.g. /s/ → /t/ in an tsagairt, /s/ → /f/ in O.Ir. in phiur, nasal mutation in Welsh, "provection" in Cornish and/or Breton (I can't remember if they both have it), etc. I really think going into any detail about Celtic mutations in this article will simply distract the reader from the main topic. We should be focusing on things like flapping in English, spirantization in Spanish, and that sort of thing. +Angr 18:02, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: No it's not. /s/ → /t/ IS lenition, it just so happens that the article has retained the form int in this case, so technically it's an tshagairt. /s/ → /f/ in the case of sister is an exceptional case of swesōr under lenition turning into hwehūr, the hw labialising into /f/ (hence mo/do/a fiur) whereas ar/far/a yielded ar/far/a siur. Nothing weird about that all. I must confess to a lack of knowledge on the Brythonic side, though I suspect similar processes at work. Akerbeltz (talk) 19:15, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: My point is, /s/ → /t/ and /s/ → /f/ are lenition in the sense of a morphosyntactically conditioned consonant mutation in a Celtic language, but they are certainly not lenition in the sense of a phonological increase in sonority. And intervocalic /t/ → [ð] in Manx is not lenition-the-morphosyntactically-conditioned-consonant-mutation (despite occurring in a Celtic language) but it is lenition-the-phonological-increase-in-sonority. Lenition thus means two very different things, and I think it would be less confusing for readers if we treated them in separate articles: this article can cover the phonological increase in sonority, and Irish initial mutations (or even a more general article on Celtic initial mutations) can cover the morphosyntactic consonant mutation. There are much clearer examples of diachronic lenitionphono that we can use, such as Greek /pʰ tʰ kʰ b d g/ → /f θ x v ð ɣ/. +Angr 21:40, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

text: Yes, phonological lenition can consist of changes other than an increase in sonority, like debuccalization and degemination. That doesn't change my main point: that the term "lenition" is used to describe two utterly different phenomena, and this article is failing to distinguish them. Even the lead is confusing the two issues by first saying, "lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages" and then proceeding to give examples of voicing and spirantization that are not mutations. +Angr 22:19, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Lenition and Eclipsis

message: Shouldn't the original sound in the "sonorization" chart be the aspirated stop, which then becomes the unaspirated (then voiced, etc)? Jmolina116 (talk) 21:37, 3 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The starting point could be either but I guess since the topic of that chart is sonorization, the person who made the chart decided to just start at the point before the sonorization step. After all, the starting point could equally be /tt/ or /t:/ or /t'/ - but that's not the issue here. Akerbeltz (talk) 09:10, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Aspirates in Sonorization Lenition

message: The section on what happens with grammatical lenition in Scottish Gaelic is very clear - well done to those who worked on it. But two things strike me. First, most people will find it far easier to understand (especially the bits about liquids and nasals) if it were possible to have sound files attached to the key examples. Second, what I can't find anywhere in Wiki is a good explanation of blocked lenition. Of course, this is a general article on lenition in world languages, so possibly there is already too much on Scottish Gaelic - in that case maye this explanation should be put somewhere else. But it would be good to have it somewhere. --Doric Loon (talk) 08:16, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Glad to heard that! I've added a section (sorry, no time for refs right now, bear with me, but shouldn't be controversial as such). Feel free to tweak stuff, I admit it was done in a hurry! Akerbeltz (talk) 10:00, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I still think we're not helping anyone by lumping morphosyntactic lenition in with phonological lenition. Angr (talk) 22:26, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: And I still maintain that Joe Blogs looking for this thing called lenition won't have a clue which one they're looking for :) Akerbeltz (talk) 22:40, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Joe Blogs isn't going to be looking for anything called lenition unless he's already had some exposure to linguistics. It's not like it's a term you encounter in newspapers. Angr (talk) 22:48, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks, Akerbeltz, for that speedy addition. I just read Blas na Gàidhlig, and to me it will do very nicely as a provisional citation. --Doric Loon (talk) 23:24, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

text: Having been to a Gaelic/Irish/Manx/etc. class for more than a week counts as having had some exposure to linguistics. And regardless of the amount of exposure to linguistics, readers will be less confused if this article knows what it's about rather than pingponging back and forth between phonological processes of lenition and morphosyntactic mutations called "lenition" for historical reasons. We really need two articles, Lenition (phonology) (or maybe Lenition (phonetics)) and Lenition (mutation). Angr (talk) 06:54, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a really bizarre definition of "exposure to linguistics"... <shrugs> put it up for a vote and we'll see what the rest of Wikipedia thinks. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:22, 30 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scottish Gaelic section - two requests 

message: It strikes me as somewhat bizarre to present "sgian-dubh" as an example of "frozen forms involving the other two groups (labials and velars)" because the group involved here is dentals.  However, it is a frozen form in the sense that "sgian dhubh" is now quite common while the compound word is always "sgian-dubh", so deleting this example maybe isn't the right approach - rewording "involving the other two groups" would perhaps be a good idea.  Michealt (talk) 01:55, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: The word 'too' was missing, well spotted. But as for the fashion item, it's still pretty solidly -dubh in my experience. Of course, any old kitchen knife is indeed dhubh. Probably hard to determine until we get a proper corpus. Akerbeltz (talk) 11:32, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Frozen forms 

message: I've been reading Terry Crowley's An Introduction to Historical Linguistics 2ed. On p. 39 he says: "voiced sounds [e.g. b] can be considered 'stronger' than voiceless sounds [e.g. p]". However, this article says that [p] changes to [b] by lenition/weakening. So which is right? Or are they talking about different things, perhaps diachronic vs synchronic sound change?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.127.198.234 (talk) 13:25, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: What's the larger context in which Crowley is stating that? Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:54, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: In terms of tension of the muscles in the mouth, we distinguish between fortis and lenis, whereby in English /p/ is fortis (strong) and /b/ is lenis (weak). However on a different level, voicing makes a sound louder and you could understand that as being stronger. My personal subjective feeling when thinking about my own speach is that /b/ is a stronger sound than /p/. So although "lenition" means "weakening", I would prefer to use the technical term: "lenis" means something specific, but "weak" could be understood different ways. --Doric Loon (talk) 12:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

text: Agreed. That's why I asked for the context of Crowley's statement. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 12:48, 27 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lenition: voiced consonant > unvoiced consonant?