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	Lenition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many 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.
		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" /m/→/v/, but not the feminine possessive, 'a màthair' "her mother").
	www.wikipedia.org /wiki/Soft_mutation (694 words)

	Lenition - Encyclopedia, History, Geography and Biography
		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).
		Synchronical lenition happens in the Celtic languages, where it's conditioned by grammatical rules (for example, the initial consonant of a noun is lenited, if applicable, when preceded by an article).
		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).
	www.arikah.com /encyclopedia/Lenition (208 words)

	Fios Feasa: Lenition in Irish
		Afterwards, the lenited sound itself was lost in speech, and the vowel was lengthened in compensation.
		Lenition is shown in Irish by combining the original letter with the letter h, much as in English th, ch, ph, or sh.
		Under lenition, it ceases to be pronounced at all.
	www.fiosfeasa.com /bearla/language/seimhiu.htm (773 words)

	Lenition -- Facts, Info, and Encyclopedia article (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		Lenition is a kind of (A speech sound that is not a vowel) consonant ((genetics) any event that changes genetic structure; any alteration in the inherited nucleic acid sequence of the genotype of an organism) mutation that appears in many (A systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols) languages.
		Lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from (Any dialect of the language of ancient Rome) 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).
		Synchronical lenition happens in the Celtic languages, where it's conditioned by grammatical rules (for example, the initial consonant of a (A word that can be used to refer to a person or place or thing) noun is lenited, if applicable, when preceded by an article).
	www.absoluteastronomy.com /encyclopedia/l/le/lenition.htm (209 words)

	IRISH 07 (Ceacht 7) - Lenition and Eclipses (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		Lenition means softening, referring to the replacement of hard and abrupt sounds by the more hissing sounds.
		Lenition is what causes the word to change sound in Irish, since Irish is a very oral language pronounciation is very important...
		Lenition occurs with certain words, such as "a" used when addressing a person, the definite article [i]an[/i], and possessive pronouns.
	www.phrasebase.com /archive/25_irish_07_ceacht_7.html (518 words)

	Lenition (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appearsin many languages.
		Lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from Latin lenis, as in the rootof 'lenient'), and it refers to the change of a consonant considered 'strong' into one considered 'weak' (fortis →lenis).
		Synchronical lenition happens in the Celtic languages, where it's conditioned by grammatical rules (for example, the initialconsonant of a noun is lenited, if applicable, when preceded by an article).
	www.therfcc.org /lenition-49115.html (177 words)

	Encyclopedia: Lenition (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		The name lenition appears especially, but not exclusively, in the context of Celtic languages such as Welsh and Irish, in which it is pervasive.
		A consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture sufficient to cause audible turbulence, at one or more points along the vocal tract.
		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 'mÃ thair' "mother" - 'a mhÃ thair' "his mother" /m/->/v/, but not the feminine possessive, 'a mÃ thair' "her mother").
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Lenition (958 words)

	Lenition in Gaelic Naming Step By Step
		Lenition can be difficult for those unfamiliar with it to figure out, and this is complicated by the fact that in medieval Gaelic naming there are three distinct and independent lenition issues involved:
		The article The Spelling of Lenited Consonants in Gaelic explains how lenition was shown in medieval Gaelic spelling in different periods.
		Check The Spelling of Lenited Consonants in Gaelic to see how the lenition should be shown in the spelling of the lenited word/name, then proceed to Step 3.
	medievalscotland.org /scotnames/lenitionstepbystep.shtml (535 words)

	Kingston --- Lenition: When (some) sonority differences don't matter (abstract) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		This discrepancy is the point of departure for reinterpreting lenition as phonetic evidence that the affected consonant is inside rather than at the edge of a prosodic constituent.
		Leniting a consonant interrupts the signal less, and thereby weakens the separation between preceding and following material.
		That is, speakers don't lenite consonants to avoid over-exertion but instead to provide listeners with information about the prosodic constituency of their utterances.
	ling.ucsc.edu /events/past_colloquia/abstracts/kingston.html (259 words)

	Dissertation Abstract
		A comparison of the sociolinguistic conditioning of vowel reduction and palatal affricate lenition in Russian and Spanish reveals substantial similarities, a fact which suggests that Connected Speech Processes are controlled to a great extent by general, non-language-specific principles.
		Linguistically, reduction and lenition are motivated to a great extent by clearly articulatory factors; for example, such processes occur most often in prosodically non-prominent positions, and where the potential for simplification of complex articulatory sequences is greatest.
		Socially, reduction and lenition are strongly favored by low socioeducational status and younger age, without exception, although the gender correlations present a somewhat mixed picture.
	www-rcf.usc.edu /~paus/abs.html (281 words)

	I Lam Arth
		Lenition of following adjectives is different from the other mutation conditions in that the words that undergo mutation are adjuncts, not complements.
		Lenition of pêd is often explained by a theory that verbs immediately after their subjects are lenited.
		The lenition of pêd in guren bêd enni is almost certainly not due to some close association between the subject and the verb; in other languages, verb-object, not subject-verb, is the relation for which this type of phenomenon is found.
	sindarin.weet.us /syntax.html (3325 words)

	Syllable-final /s/ is subject to lenition in many Latin American Spanish dialects
		Lenition of -/s/ is a variable phonological process in which an-/s/ may be aspirated (pronounced [h]) or deleted altogether (Ø).
		Lenition of -/s/ has been widely studied by sociolinguists, who have identified various linguistic and extralinguistic factors that favor the process.
		This corpus is especially well-suited to the task of studying variation in -/s/ lenition because it contains informal speech by a large number of speakers from many different dialects.
	www.ldc.upenn.edu /Catalog/desc/addenda/LDC2001T60.htm (1719 words)

	Tragheiteish ->
		These are used only for people, such as on occupations, and it does lenite the noun(s), except for deneir, which doesn't lenite the noun.
		Lenition happens to nouns in the possessive state (ie his boat), giving a definite article (ie the car) oppose to an indefinite article (ie car), its also used in the past tense of verbs (ie he walked).
		Lenition: All primary consonants take an h (ie t becomes th), if the word starts with no consonant, an h will be placed in front of the primary vowel.
	www.freewebs.com /slauca/lenitionandotherpartsof.htm (317 words)

	Lenition
		A note to begin with - some people refer to lenition as "aspiration" - try not to do so yourself, as "aspiration" is something entirely different and should not be confused with leniton.
		Lenition on the other hand means that a sound is changed into something else, such as
		Not all Gaelic consonats can be lenited, but a lot of them can and some of these lenitions are not as "straightforward" as you might think.
	www.akerbeltz.org /beagangaidhlig/gramar/grammar_lenition2.htm (213 words)

	Tepa Phonology
		Only these symbols will be used in the practical orthography (with the addition of , which is explained in the section De-syllabification), although I will more narrowly transcribe examples given to illustrate phonological and morphological phenomena.
		Lenition, or the weakening of consonants, is the most pervasive phonological process in Tepa.
		Lenition affects the voiceless stops /p,t,k/ and /l/.
	www.langmaker.com /featured/tepaphon.htm (954 words)

	Reading Middle Welsh -- 6 Lenition
		Lenition is a pronunciation phenomenon which is widespread in Western European languages, but in Welsh (and in Celtic generally) it has a special importance because it is not merely a change of pronunciation.
		6.2 Lenition is the "softening" of a consonant when it is between two vowels (or between a vowel and a semi-vowel like r or l).
		Therefore the lenited form is found in many situations where the previous word would originally have ended in a vowel.
	canol.home.att.net /chap06.html (643 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		We study l lenition on the basis of 910 tokens extracted from the speech of 6 native speakers of Bulgarian in three different styles: free conversation, word list and connected text.
		This can be viewed as a reflect of phonotactic restrictions captured by SDP, which derives CV as the optimal syllable, the implication being that an onset consonant may move down the sonority scale, whereas a coda consonant may move up.
		The prediction can be made that due to l lenition this language may in the long run acquire glide w and possibly a contrast between long and short vowels which existed in Proto-Slavic.
	www.ling.upenn.edu /~nagy/nwav/WWWabs/Alexandrova.html (511 words)

	The Spelling of Lenited Consonants in Gaelic
		Grammatical lenition involves a "softening" of the initial consonant sound of words and is required by Gaelic grammar in certain situations.
		This article explains the spelling changes involved in lenition, but it is beyond the scope of this article to explain when lenition occurs and exactly how it affects pronunciation.
		Lenition was often not shown in spelling for in the early medieval period.
	www.medievalscotland.org /scotlang/lenition.shtml (963 words)

	Fios Feasa: Initial Mutations in Irish
		Similarly, in certain compound prepositions, lenition is the difference between "him" and "her".
		The form a athair (technically with lenition) means "his father", but a hathair, with lomadh, means "her father".
		Historically this is a development of lenition, although you'd never be able to tell that from the modern language.
	www.fiosfeasa.com /bearla/language/claochlo.htm (763 words)

	diss page (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		[Lenition, or consonant weakening, describes a range of phonetically diverse sound changes, including vocalization, elision, rhotacism, lambdacism, flapping, and spirantization.
		H. presents a unified phonological analysis of processes affecting consonantal strength, primarily lenition but including some cases of fortition, cast in terms of a prosodic template.
		Case studies in the role of the prosodic template in synchronic and diachronic phonological processes include the historical evolution and synchronic status of d-deletion and d-lenition in Dutch and a templatic analysis of Verner’s Law, as well as lenition and fortition processes in a range of Native American languages.
	wings.buffalo.edu /linguistics/ssila/dissertations/inddiss/d191.htm (111 words)

	Gaelic : Gàidhlig
		Lenition is an important aspect of Scottish Gaelic.
		For example, lenition changes p to an f sound which is spelt ph.
		Lenition is usually caused by a preceding word.
	www.isleofberneray.com /gaelic (830 words)

	Abstract: Kirchner (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		Despite the pervasiveness of lenition in the sound systems of natural language, previous theories have failed to capture formally the phonetic unity of the various lenition processes (e.g.
		This chapter presents a unified approach to consonant lenition, wherein particular lenition patterns arise from Optimality Theoretic conflict between a principle of effort minimization (which I style Lazy), and faithfulness to auditory features, in combination with (perceptually-based) fortition constraints, building upon the proposals of Jun (1995) and Flemming (1995).
		The approach is illustrated with analysis of a several lenition processes in Florentine Italian, both obligatory and variable.
	www.humnet.ucla.edu /linguistics/people/hayes/PBP/KirchnerAbstract.htm (139 words)

	ABSTRACT (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		If we take lenition to be weakening of consonants in the sense of strength hierarchies, rather than a change from ‘fortis’ to ‘lenis’, then Germanic languages and dialects have reacted to OSL by weakening their consonants to varying degrees.
		In isolated dialects, like North Frisian and Bavarian dialects, there are minor lenitions, which clearly show the connection of postvocalic consonant weakening to vowel lengthening.
		Although the reduction of distinctive consonant features, taken to the extreme in Danish, may be seen as part of the general Germanic trend to concentrate phonological information on the root syllable, it is unclear why some varieties have a greater reaction to OSL than others.
	ling.uni-konstanz.de /pages/conferences/interkoq/goblirsch.htm (576 words)

	Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 553 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
		In Irish, the letter "h" is primarily used to mark the sound-change called "lenition" (literally "softening"), and originally for the most part the result of lenition was a sound that was a fricative equivalent of the original sound.
		So, for example, lenited "c" is spelled "ch" and pronounced like the "hard ch" in German "Bach" or Scottish "loch"; similarly lenited "b" is spelled "bh" and represents the fricative sound made in the same place as "b" -- as a rough approximation the English sound represented by v.
		In medieval and modern Irish, lenition strikes the learner as somewhat arbitrary in where it appears, but there is a pattern.
	www.panix.com /~gabriel/public-bin/showfinal.cgi/553.txt (365 words)

	Irish - Wikibooks
		There are two ways lenition is shown in writing: the old style (seanchló), in which a dot is placed over the consonant, and the new/modern style, where an h is added after the consonant.
		One of the trickier exceptions to the normal lenition rules is the infamous "dentals-dots rule": if you have a d, t, or s (the consonants in "dots") which would be lenited, but the letter before it is one of d, n, t, l, or s (the consonants in "dentals"), you don't lenite it after all.
		Also, the letter s is not lenited when it is directly followed by one of c, p, t, m, or f, since there's no way (in Irish) that you could pronounce something like shf or shc.
	en.wikibooks.org /wiki/Irish (4446 words)

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