[etnolinguistica] RE: Lenition in Northwest Ge

[Dan Everett]

Andres asks: "One question I would like to ask is what the nature of the
evidence is for believing that the process in question is lenition
rather than fortition. If this were fortition, it would be quite
unproblematic, right?"

Sorry, I missed your point the first time around. The reason I do not
consider it fortition, i.e. assuming that r/w are strengthed
phrase-internally to t/p is that nonalternating /r/s and /w/s also
occur. 

Moreover, the conditions for /p/ lenition are different, slightly. While
both t and p lenite pre-pausally, p also lenites in coda position.

So, we have: 	t --> r/___##
			p --> w/___. and ___##
			k --> g/___## (Optional)

This is interesting for yet another reason, namely, that it is the kind
of variation among 'phonemes' that would be expected in a good
old-fashioned structuralist phonemic approach, but would also be hard to
handle in a SPE-type distinctive feature analysis, simply because these
consonants are a natural class and, ceteris paribus, we would have
expected them to behave uniformly. The problem of traditional phonemics,
failure to insightfully capture natural classes, is an advantage here,
if one wanted to press it, which I do not.

-- Dan



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