Diachronic Diachronic lenition is found, for example, in the change from
Latin into
Spanish, in which the
intervocalic voiceless stops first changed into their voiced counterparts , and later into the approximants or fricatives : > , > , > , > . One stage in these changes goes beyond phonetic to have become a
phonological restructuring, e.g. > (compare in Italian, with no change in the phonological status of ). The subsequent further weakening of the series to phonetic , as in is diachronic in the sense that the developments took place over time and displaced as the normal pronunciations between vowels. It is also synchronic in an analysis of as
allophonic realizations of : illustrating with , 'wine' is pronounced after pause, but with intervocalically, as in 'of wine'; likewise, → . A similar development occurred in the Celtic languages, where non-geminate intervocalic consonants were converted into their corresponding weaker counterparts through lenition (usually stops into fricatives but also laterals and trills into weaker laterals and taps), and voiceless stops became voiced. For example, Indo-European intervocalic in "people" resulted in
Proto-Celtic ,
Primitive Irish ,
Old Irish and ultimately debuccalisation in most Irish and some Scottish dialects to , shift in Central Southern Irish to , and complete deletion in some Modern Irish and most Modern Scots Gaelic dialects, thus . An example of historical lenition in the
Germanic languages is evidenced by Latin-English cognates such as , , vs.
father,
thin,
horn. The Latin words preserved the original stops, which became fricatives in old Germanic by
Grimm's law. A few centuries later, the
High German consonant shift led to a second series of lenitions in
Old High German, chiefly of post-vocalic stops, as evidenced in the English-German cognates
ripe,
water,
make vs. , , . Although actually a much more profound change encompassing syllable restructuring, simplification of
geminate consonants as in the passage from Latin to Spanish such as cuppa > 'cup' is often viewed as a type of lenition (compare geminate-preserving Italian ).
Synchronic Allophonic All varieties of
Sardinian, with the sole exception of
Nuorese, offer an example of
sandhi in which the rule of intervocalic lenition applying to the voiced series extends across word boundaries. Since it is a fully active synchronic rule, lenition is not normally indicated in the standard orthographies. A
series of synchronic lenitions involving opening, or loss of occlusion, rather than voicing is found for post-vocalic in many
Tuscan dialects of
Central Italy. Stereotypical
Florentine, for example, has the of as 'house' in a post-pause realization, 'in (the) house' post-consonant, but 'the house' intervocalically. Word-internally, the normal realization is also : 'hole' → .
Grammatical In the
Celtic languages, the phenomenon of intervocalic lenition historically extended across word boundaries. This explains the rise of
grammaticalised initial
consonant mutations in modern Celtic languages through the loss of endings. A
Scottish Gaelic example would be the lack of lenition in ("the man") and lenition in ("the woman"). The following examples show the development of a phrase consisting of a definite article plus a masculine noun (taking the ending ) compared with a feminine noun taking the ending . The historic development of lenition in those two cases can be reconstructed as follows: :
Proto-Celtic IPA: → Old Irish → Middle Irish →
Classical Gaelic → Modern Gaelic :Proto-Celtic IPA: → Old Irish → Middle Irish → Classical Gaelic → Modern Gaelic Synchronic lenition in Scottish Gaelic affects almost all consonants (except , which has lost its lenited counterpart in most areas). Changes such as to involve the loss of
secondary articulation; in addition, → involves the reduction of a
trill to a
tap. The spirantization of Gaelic nasal to is unusual among forms of lenition, but it is triggered by the same environment as more prototypical lenition. (It may also leave a residue of
nasalization in adjacent vowels.) The orthography shows that by inserting an (except after ).
Blocked lenition Some languages which have lenition have in addition complex rules affecting situations where lenition might be expected to occur but does not, often those involving
homorganic consonants. This is colloquially known as 'blocked lenition', or more technically as 'homorganic inhibition' or 'homorganic blocking'. In Scottish Gaelic, for example, there are three homorganic groups: • d n t l s (usually called the
dental group in spite of the non-dental nature of the palatals) • c g (usually called the
velar group) • b f m p (usually called the
labial group) In a position where lenition is expected due to the grammatical environment, lenition tends to be blocked if there are two adjacent homorganic consonants across the word boundary. For example: ( as a feminine noun normally causes lenition of a following modifier, for example 'Friday' yields 'Friday night'). Within Celtic, blocked lenition phenomena also occur in Irish (for example 'one door', 'the first person') and
Manx (for example 'one door', 'the first man'). Outside Celtic, in
Spanish orthographic b d g are retained as following nasals rather than their normal lenited forms . ==Orthography==