Talk:Fortis and lenis

message: Consonant mutation, Consonant gradation, Lenition, Fortition and Fortis and lenis all seem to be about the same kind of phenomenon. Perhaps they should be merged. FilipeS 21:29, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think these terms are all well different enough. If there were a merger, then perhaps fortition might be merged into lenition. Fortis and lenis is very different from fortition and lenition because the former describes different kinds of sounds, but the latter different kinds of sound change. Consonant gradation seems to be a well defined technical term in the description of Finnish and related languages; consonant mutation is a well defined technical term in the description of insular Celtic languages. -- j. 'mach' wust ☞ ☏ 21:59, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

text: The terms fortis and lenis (without the terms fortition and lenition) are traditionally used in the description of German, especially of Southern German. Celtic conosnant mutation is the result of a historical sandhi effect across morpheme boundaries, whereas consonant gradation is a word-internal phenomenon. -- j. 'mach' wust ☞ ☏ 07:26, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Doesn't it? It seemed to me that the section Fortis and lenis#History and use of the terms was very explicit about this. How would you improve it? -- j. 'mach' wust ☞ ☏ 11:41, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merger?

message: I hesitate to change this page, because I'm not a phonetician, but certainly if you're a linguist working on Zapotec languages you use the terms fortis and lenis.  "Seldom used in current linguistics" doesn't really seem right to me.  Thanks.  Blillehaugen 16:00, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Very true. I don't know how else current linguistics describe the phonetics of the languages that have a fortis/lenis contrast such as Zapotec. I will strike that phrase. Also never hesitate, your (great) knowledge about general linguistics is quite enough to confidently edit articles in any linguistic topic that you feel you have something to say about. Also btw I am glad to see a proffesional mesoamericanist linguist contributing to wikipedia. Welcome! ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 18:13, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "Seldom used in current linguistics?"

message: In describing specific languages, the words fortis and lenis are used to refer to specific phonetic distinctions and sound changes. However, the terms fortis and lenis are used to refer to different phonetic distinctions in different languages. Therefore, it is not possible to give more than a very general definition of these words. When using the terms comparatively, isn't it better to think of them as referring to a phonological category? Or should we think of them as referring to a general phonetic tendency, rather than a more specific category such as "nasal"?Pete unseth (talk) 22:34, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: AFAIK, they're always used for a phonemic distinction. AFAIK, no-one compares /k/ in one language w /k/ in another and concludes that one is 'fortis' and the other 'lenis', unless such a distinction applies within the languages as well. — kwami (talk) 09:46, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it formerly was supposed to be something more phonetic, but the primary utility is as a phonological category.  It's sort of a catchall category.  Some languages might have strict contrasts with a single feature (e.g. length) that is considered forits.  In English, there are contrasts that are termed fortis and lenis because there isn't an easy feature that distinguishes them in all contexts (sometimes it's voicing, sometimes glottalization, other times aspiration). — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 16:27, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonological rather than phonetic? 

message: The claim this page makes that /d/ is voiceless in American English is killing me because it's not even slightly true, and I'm sure that just about anyone who knows anything at all about linguistics would agree on that. And I can further confirm that it's false because I'm American and never hear it pronounced like that, not to mention the fact that there's probably around ten pages or more on Wikipedia that contradict this claim. An unvoiced variant is definitely nonstandard if it even exists at all. I'm hesitant to change it without saying something here first because it would involve rewriting a good chunk of a section of the page and it would probably get reverted since I don't edit Wikipedia often, but I am very confident I'm right on this. Globins (talk) 01:02, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Siverman 2004 is a reliable source for the voicelessness of the lenis stops. You would need to do some research and produce other reliable sources for voicedness. Then we could find a neutral point of view for both positions. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 06:50, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

text: Maybe you're equating voicelessness with aspiration.  isn't aspirated, it's just voiceless/partially voiced. Nobody is claiming that dock is pronounced like tock (I'd write it talk but maybe you don't have the cot-caught merger, in which case it'd make less sense). In Germany, some areas (yes, I'm speaking about Standard German spoken with a regional accent) have done away with the fortis–lenis opposition and the resulting (merged) sound can, AFAIK, be aspirated, which results in pronunciations such as  for die, or  for glauben (an unaspirated  for  is very usual, though, as in Danish). This, I imagine, must be very confusing to most learners of German who are explicitly taught to equate onset (and intervocalic, of course)  with orthographic . Sol505000 (talk) 05:27, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  English /b,d,g/ are voiced in some contexts, voiceless in others. That's why calling them "voiced" is problematical. See for example Ladefoged Course in Phonetics, (5th edition, p. 56) ".. most speakers of English have no voicing during the closure of so-called voiced stops in sentence initial position, or when they occur after a voiceless sound as in 'that boy' ". RoachPeter (talk) 20:29, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  d is voiceless?