fortis and lenis

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 01:32 PM 9/11/2000 -0400, Frank Abate <abatefr at earthlink.net> wrote:
>As linguistics was in its infancy in the 1930s, at least as a study under
>that name, you might check under the heading of philology, or perhaps
>historical linguistics.I would not be surprised if the (19th c.) German
>Neogrammarians or their students used these terms in describing sounds in
>ancient languages.  It is also possible that one of the ancient commentators
>or grammarians used the terms.  Check in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae for
>evidence of the specialized senses.
>

Though the original query might be taken to imply a focus on the
twentieth-century use of these terms in application to consonant
articulations, it may be of interest to note that such terms were also used
in application to what were viewed as nonconsonantal articulations by
nineteenth-century scientific philologists before that discipline was
replaced by (or, was morphed into) modern linguistics.

The most *widely* disseminated (i.e., the most popularly known, though not
always the most technically unimpeachable) anglophone books on technical
issues of philology were those of F. Max M"uller. In the work that made his
popular reputation, _Lectures on the Science of Language_ (Second Series_,
1864 if memory serves) he discusses what he and others were referring to as
_spiritus asper_ and _spiritus lenis_; see the chapter on phonetics (pp. 138
ff. in the 1873 edition I'm looking at). The discussion and notes in this
passage make it clear that _s. asper_ and _s. lenis_ were in common use
among language scientists by the early 1860s.

M"uller employs the two terms not in application to what he classifies as
consonants but instead in application to what he terms "breathings,"
respectively, an h sound (asper) and what I would think of as a glottal stop
though he does not classify it as a stop (lenis). He cites a usage history
going back to ancient Latin and beyond that to Greek terminology (e.g.,
_pneuma dasu_, the word-initial h-like sound in ancient Greek that is still
termed "rough breathing").

Subsequent deployments of Latin articulatory terms by early 20th cent.
linguists would probably have had to take established nineteenth-century
usages as their point of departure. I hope this helps and is not too
irrelevant and/or obvious!

[I haven't checked the rest of MM's huge output (1840s-1900). I've just
typed up what came to mind in the few minutes I had available when I saw
this thread.]



Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu