Fortis-lenis vs voiced-voiceless plosives in Welsh

This paper questions the voiceless-voiced distinction of Welsh consonants and claims that the fortis-lenis distinction is more appropriate for the description of the language. In light of research results of theoretical as well as experimental investigations into Welsh, e.g. the vowel-coda length dependence discovered by Asmus and Grawunder (2017), advocated further research into that matter, seeing also that the fortis-lenis distinction establishes a firm link to focal properties of Welsh, such as morpheme-initial consonant mutations (mICM). It was, therefore, decided to look at potential phonetic features that would contribute to the postulated distinction. These features are aspiration, voicing, hold phase duration and the centre of gravity (abbreviated to CoG) in the articulation of Welsh plosives. Preliminary results of the study discussed in this paper were summarised in “Fortis-lenis or Voiced-voiceless – features of Welsh consonants” (Asmus et al. 2019). However, expanding our research has yielded more comprehensive findings. As a result, it appears that the two series of plosives under review are different in terms of all features studied, but it is aspiration that is of major importance (thus confirming classifications of Welsh as an aspiration language).

Old Irish and the Celtic languages

Old Irish is a notoriously difficult language, and the chapter begins with an account of why this is so, exploring the features such as consonant mutations, palatalization, the absolute and conjunct inflections of verbs, conjugated prepositions, verb-initial sentences, and infixed pronouns that make it so distinct from the other languages considered so far. But even so, it is still of Indo-European stock, and a couple of selections from the Táin Bó Cuailnge reveal some of this shared ancestry. The chapter also offers an extended comparison with Welsh, another important member of the Celtic branch, highlighting, with an excerpt from the Mabinogion, the Celtic features common to it and Irish, as well as the points of difference between the two.

Segmental Phonology: Consonants

This chapter discusses the consonant phoneme inventory, briefly comparing the Chichewa consonant inventory with that of Proto-Bantu, before turning to the distribution of the consonants in different morphologically defined positions (stem-initial, stem-medial, affixes). The second half of the chapter surveys the main consonantal phonological processes. The processes discussed include regular and productive processes, like nasal place assimilation and postnasal stop aspiration, and morphologically conditioned consonant mutations involved in the formation of noun class 5/6 singular–plural pairs and in the formation of causative verbs.

Daoulagad — A Celto-Slavic OCR Dictionary

In this paper we present Daoulagad [dɔwˈlaːgat], a mobile Celtic-Russian dictionary, supporting Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The dictionary provides Cymraeg↔Русский, Cymraeg↔English, Cymraeg↔Gaeilge, Cymraeg↔Brezhoneg, Gaeilge↔Русский, Gaeilge↔English, Brezhoneg↔Русский, English↔Русский translations, supports initial consonant mutations and ‘Item and Arrangement’ & ‘Word and Paradigm’ morphological models. OCR capabilities make it possible to use iPhone or Android phone's camera as input device. OCR errors are corrected using trigram frequencies calculated over an extensive corpus. Also supported are Belarusian, Bulgarian, Croatian/Serbian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian and Ukranian (as well as English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Arabic and hanzi/kanji).

independence of phonology and morphology: the Celtic mutations

One of the most important insights of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that phonological processes can be reduced to the interaction between faithfulness and universal markedness principles. In the most constrained version of the theory, all phonological processes should be thus reducible. This hypothesis is tested by alternations that appear to be phonological but in which universal markedness principles appear to play no role. If we are to pursue the claim that all phonological processes depend on the interaction of faithfulness and markedness, then processes that are not dependent on markedness must lie outside phonology. In this paper I will examine a group of such processes, the initial consonant mutations of the Celtic languages, and argue that they belong entirely to the morphology of the languages, not the phonology.

What is lenition?

Most phonological textbooks and treatises do not define lenition or weakening, as it is also called. Instead they provide a list of examples of processes which they wish to term ‘lenitions’ or ‘weakenings’. It is then hoped that the reader will deduce a correct definition. This is what is done in, for example, Lass & Anderson (1975: 150) and Sommerstein (1977: 228). One of the few available definitions of lenition is to be derived from Vennemann's definition of relative weakness (cited in Hyman, 1975: 165): ‘A segment X is said to be weaker than a segment Y if Y goes through an X stage on its way to zero.’ According to this definition, lenition is primarily a diachronic process affecting the sound structure of languages. It may also have synchronie reflexes (such as initial consonant mutations in the Celtic languages), but these are called ‘lenitions’ by an extension of the term from diachrony.