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In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous (vowel-like). The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin ''lenis'' = weak). Lenition can happen both synchronically (i.e. within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (i.e. as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as making a consonant more sonorous, causing a consonant to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called ''debuccalization'', which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like or ), or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely. An example of synchronic lenition in English is found in flapping in some dialects: the of a word like ''wait'' becomes the more sonorous in the related form ''waiting'' . Some dialects of Spanish show debuccalization of to at the end of a syllable, so that a word like "we are" is pronounced . An example of diachronic lenition can be found in the Romance languages, where the of Latin ラテン語:''patrem'' ("father", accusative) becomes in Italian and in Spanish , while in French フランス語:''père'' and Portuguese it has disappeared completely. Along with assimilation, lenition is one of the primary sources of phonological change of languages. In some languages, lenition has been grammaticalized into a consonant mutation, which means it is no longer triggered by its phonological environment but is now governed by its syntactic or morphological environment. For example, in Welsh, the word "cat" begins with the sound , but after the definite article , the changes to : "the cat" in Welsh is . This was historically due to intervocalic lenition, but in the plural, lenition does not happen, so "the cats" is , not *. The change of to in is thus caused by the syntax of the phrase, not by the phonological position of the consonant . The opposite of lenition, fortition, a sound change that makes a consonant "stronger", is less common. ==Types== Lenition involves changes in manner of articulation, sometimes accompanied by small changes in place of articulation. There are two main lenition pathways: opening and sonorization. In both cases, a stronger sound becomes a weaker one. Lenition can be seen as a movement on the sonority hierarchy from less sonorous to more sonorous, or on a strength hierarchy from stronger to weaker. In examples below, a greater-than sign indicates that one sound changes to another. The notation > means that changes to . The sound change of palatalization sometimes involves lenition. Lenition includes the loss of a feature, such as deglottalization, in which glottalization or ejective articulation is lost: or > . The tables below show common sound changes involved in lenition. In some cases, lenition may skip one of the sound changes. The change voiceless stop > fricative is more common than the series of changes voiceless stop > affricate > fricative. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lenition」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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