Lenition weakens consonant sounds within a word to reduce airflow interruptions during speech. There are four types: spirantization, fricative opening, debuccalization, and deletion. Lenited consonants are affected by adjacent letters and can be synchronic or diachronic. Examples include Irish and Welsh syntax and German’s Grim’s Law.
Lenition is a consonant mutation that weakens the sound a consonant makes within a word. This change can occur anywhere within the word, depending on the nature of the language or dialect in question. There are four main types of lenition: spirantization, fricative opening, debuccalization, and deletion. These changes are made synchronously, as an active change within the modern language, or diachronically, as a change fossilized with language development. The purpose of this mutation is to reduce the amount of airflow interruptions caused by consonants during speech.
Spirantization is the process of making a more fricative sound, which involves forcing air through a narrow passage that is created inside the mouth by the lips or tongue’s interaction with the teeth or palate. By forcing air through an explosive stop, the speaker enhances the flow of sounds and thus creates a fricative. An alternative is to transform the consonant that interrupts the airflow into a glottal consonant in a process called debuccalization. In some cases the consonant may be deleted altogether in speech, but may still remain in the written form of the word.
Changing the shape of a consonant changes its level of loudness. To be more sonorous is to be more like a vowel. The effect of making consonants more vowel-like is that they reduce the amount of breaks within a sentence. A consonant that has gone through the lenition process is called a lenited consonant. The opposite of making a consonant louder is called fortification.
Lenited consonants are affected by two sets of adjacent letters surrounding them. The changes can depend on the vowels immediately surrounding the consonant, and the strength of other consonants beyond the surrounding vowels also has an effect. If there are too many strong consonants, and thus too many plosive stops, the middle consonant becomes relaxed. The strength of a consonant in linguistics is determined by its resistance to the flow of air it causes during speech.
Synchronic lenition is a more active form of consonant weakening. These changes are an active part of a language’s grammar and word morphology. A basic example is adding “n” to “a” when placed before a vowel in English. This makes “a horse” and “an apple.” The same process occurs in Hungarian with “the” making a gall or “the twig” and az esku or “the oath”. As seen with these examples, some lenited consonants are affected by sounds in adjacent words and sounds within the word itself.
In Irish and other Celtic languages, the relationship between syntax and consonantal sound is regulated. For example, in Irish, the lenited consonant is always indicated by the letter “h” after it. This can happen at any time within the word if certain rules are followed. In Welsh, the first letter of a word such as cath which means “cat”, can change to gath under certain syntactical circumstances.
Diachronic lenition is a change in the sonority of a consonant that has taken place in the past tense of a language. Examples of this phenomenon include the transition from Old English to Modern English and the transition from Latin to Spanish. In these lessons, the sound structure of the language undergoes a profound change, but the basic words and grammar remain the same.
In German, the lenition process occurred during the development of the language from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. This change is called “Grim’s Law” and has three elements: voiced frigatives were made with aspirated voiced stops, voiceless stops with voiced stops, and voiceless frigatives with voiceless stops. When a number of sound elements move along a sound scale simultaneously, the process is called cascading.
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