Re: Lenition

Christopher Bates sikyal:

> etc. I've taken the liberty of using english's way of representing
> sounds for this... welsh uses dd for voiced th, c for k, f for v... but
> I don't see quite why the patterns are as they are. This is called
> "soft" lenition but it doesn't really seem to be softening the sounds...
> voicing a stop makes it sound harder in my opinion...
I agree with you on this opinion--but it doesn't really matter.  The real
reason for the Welsh sound changes is historical.  In places where you get
the soft mutation, there usually was once a word that ended with a vowel
before it.  The sound change was then simply voicing a sound between
vowels, which is extraordinarily common.  For example (using nonce welsh):

cant > cant (root form)
a cant > gant (soft mutation)

The reason is purely concerned with intervocalic voicing. The term "soft
mutation" was applied to this because to a lot of people voiced sounds
sound softer than voiceless sounds.  We(incl. dual) think these people are
crazy--but they still got to name the feature.

> voiced stop -> unvoiced stop -> unvoiced fricative
Very unlikely.  Unvoiced stop > unvoiced fricative is fine, but voiced
stop > unvoiced stop is very very rare, except in certain special
positions.


> or
> unvoiced fricative -> unvoiced stop -> voiced stop
And this is even worse, for the same reason.

> or something like that would have made more sense. Maybe I'm missing the
> obvious... can someone tell me why they think welsh adopted the system
> it did?
The Welsh "adopted" a very common sound change.  Later on they called it
"softening," which isn't really a linguistic term at all.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
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--G.K. Chesterton