Re: USAGE: Yet another few questions about Welsh.

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 08:23:05PM +0100, Ray Brown wrote:
> it happened very early on and in parallel to the same process that was
> going on in the Vulgar Latin of the western provinces, i.e. it's likely to
> go back to the Romano-British period.  In both sets of languages we find
> that between vowels (in in similar 'voicing' environments) the voicless
> plosives become voiced, and the voiced plosive become voiced fricatives.
I've read of this "weakening"/lenition process in spoken Latin (before
the Romance diversification, therefore common to all Romance languages)
but wasn't aware that it had happened in other languages as well.  The
Welsh process does look similar . . .  ss I understand it, the Latin
version  went something like this (in intervocalic position):

1. preexisting voiced fricatives, if any, disappeared
2. voiced stops became voiced fricatives
3. voiceless stops became voiced stops
4. geminate voiceless stops became simple voiceless stops.

so e.g. [kk] -> [k] -> [g] -> [G] -> 0.  I think the only preexisting
voiced fricative in Latin was [B], which already in BC time seems to
have become the pronunciation of both <b> and <v> in intervocalic
position, although those letters retained separate pronunciations in
initial position.

In some cases these developments happened in parallel, but in other
cases in series, so that sometimes a [g] that was already the result of
lenition from [k] was subject to further lenition to [G].

(Personally, I learned this stuff from the most excellent book
_The_History_of_the_Spanish_Language_ by Ralph Penny, which even if you
don't know or care anything about Latin, Spanish, or the Romance
languages, is a fascinating - and quite detailed! - look into how
language change works in general as illustrated by the specific example
of Spanish.)

> In other words,  lenition in the Brittonic langs were contemporary with
> those in western VL. The big difference, of course, is that the Brittonic
> langs also mutated word initial sounds within phrases. These initial
> mutations, as I'm sure you know, were at first conditioned phonologically.
>  But as other sound changes took place, these initial mutations sometimes
> lost the original phonological environment that triggered them, but the
> mutations remained.
Interesting.  I, for one, certainly did NOT know that. :)

Reply