Re: Lenition

Chris B. pondered:

>... I would have thought
>voiced stop -> unvoiced stop -> unvoiced fricative
>or
>unvoiced fricative -> unvoiced stop -> voiced stop
>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?
I would think that, at least in terms of adding voice, it could largely be
attributed to the fact that most consonants are next to vowels, and vowels
tend to be voiced, therefore the voicing gets blended into the consonant.
This would seem to be especially true when an unvoiced consonant is between
two vowels.  Note the German:

lesen,desertieren,gesamt: s=z
but,
nostalgie,essen,biestig: s=s

Another interesting note, which may or may not have to do with an s->z shift
in German is the apparent rarity of words which differ only by a s (z sound)
or ss (s sound).  I'm sure there are a few exceptions (at least one: Dusel,
Dussel), but a lack of such word pairs could represent a past s->z change,
perhaps?

Eli