Re: Lenition

En réponse à Christopher Bates <christopher.bates@...>:

>
> 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...
Well, I don't want to begin the flamewar that happened a few month ago about
whether voiced sounds are "softer" or "harder" than voiceless sounds, but
suffice to say that most people seem to find voiced sounds to be softer than
unvoiced ones (I am of them) and this is reflected in the standard way of
describing sounds in many languages. In Dutch the Southern |g| pronounced [G]
is called "zacht": soft, while the Northern one [x] is called "hard". In French
voiced stops are called "douces": soft (I even have a book which claims,
without entering into details, that there are acoustical *and* phonological
reasons to call them soft and calling voiceless stops hard). In Celtic
languages we have such terms as "lenition" or "softening". It seems that some
people (mostly English-speaking) have difficulties to imagine voiced sounds
as "softer" than unvoiced ones, but they seem to be in large minority, seen the
standard (although maybe clumsy) way of describing sounds.
Another thing is that a change voiceless->voiced is quite likely to happen in
many different environments (basically as soon as they're a vowel around, or
better two vowels around :)) ), while the opposite change is much rarer.

 but changing a
> voiced stop to a fricative makes it softer... so it seems to be softer
> -> harder -> softer. I can't think of any reason to have the pattern
> this way round... I would have thought
>
Except that for many people around the world it sounds like: hard -> softer ->
softer (to me at least, and to many other people too). Just look at what
happens in Spanish (or French), both diachronically and synchronically. Between
vowels, unvoiced stops became voiced, and later voiced stops became voiced
fricatives. This is to me a perfect example of continuous softening of
consonants.

> voiced stop -> unvoiced stop -> unvoiced fricative
> or
> unvoiced fricative -> unvoiced stop -> voiced stop
>
For me, the change voiced stop -> unvoiced stop is definitely hardening the
sound, like what happens in German and Dutch at the end of words for voiced
consonants. It's described in both languages as hardening, and my own feeling
agrees with that. As for the change unvoiced fricative -> unvoiced stop, I
cannot even conceive that you call that "softening"! It's such hardening that I
can't even imagine a single environment where it would be happening!!

> 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?
>
Simple: diachronic sound changes. There is nothing like "adopting" a system in
languages, and the only reason why a language evolves is how the sounds
influence each other. The lenition patterns of Celtic languages appeared
because the beginning of words was influenced by the sounds of words that
preceeded them in continuous speech. The actual sound changes are actually
extremely similar to what happened (and still happens) within words in Spanish.

I still really don't understand by what logic English speakers call voiced
sounds "harder" than unvoiced sounds. I was extremely surprised the first time
I heard such a claim, and I still cannot imagine what it can mean.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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