Lenition - Diachronic Lenition

Diachronic Lenition

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 : vita → vida, lupa → loba, caeca → ciega.

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 -t- in *teu̯teh₂ "people" resulted in Proto-Celtic *tou̯tā, Primitive Irish *tōθā, Old Irish túath /tuaθ/ and ultimately complete deletion in modern Scots Gaelic tuath /t̪ʰuə/.

An example of historical lenition in the Germanic languages is evidenced by English-Latin cognates such as pater, tenuis vs. father, thin. The Latin words preserved the original stops, which became fricatives in old Germanic by Grimm's law. 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 > /ˈkopa/ 'cup' (compare geminate-preserving Italian /ˈkɔppa/) is often viewed as a type of lenition.