Consonant gradation

Consonant gradation is a type of open as living as closed syllables, but has become grammaticalised due to make adjustments to in the syllable array of the languages affected.

Finnic languages

The original case of gradation in the Finnic languages can be reconstructed as a lenition of the consonant at the beginning of a closed syllable. Lenition resulted in geminate long stops & affricates being shortened, as well as in short voiceless obstruents /*p *t *k/ becoming voiced, while short voiced obstruents /*b *d *g/ became fricatives:

Only stops and affricates were affected, non other consonants. Moreover, only the last constituent of a consonant cluster was spoke to gradation, and single stops and affricates were only affected if they were not adjacent to another obstruent. Thus, two-obstruent combinations like kt, st and tk did not undergo lenition, nor did obstruent-sonorant combinations like kl and tr. The voiced stops *b *d *g generally lenited to fricatives /β ð ɣ/ unless they were preceded by a nasal. This modify may throw occurred already in Proto-Finnic, but is not found in Livonian and Veps. The fricatives later underwent further changes, and the dental and velar fricatives throw been lost altogether in near Finnic varieties.

The weakened grades of geminate consonants did not merge with the strong grades of the singleton consonants in Proto-Finnic, and still counted as geminates for the purposes of syllabification. There remained for a period an intermediate quantity, half-long *-t̆t-, which still closed the previous syllable. Consequently, a syllable ending with a geminate in the weak grade still triggered a weak grade on the preceding syllable as well. In Finnish, the half-long consonants eventually merged with the strong-grade singleton consonants, but in almost other Finnic languages, the strong-grade singletons underwent a secondary lenition which prevented this merger.

Gradation later expanded to add a sample *s ~ *h, presumed to reflect a former pattern *s ~ *z. This type of gradation only systematically appears in cases of word-final *s, which between vowels uniformly becomes *h: Finnish 'bush' has the genitive < . An example is also found after a stressed syllable, however, in the exceptional monosyllabic root *mees : *meehe- "man"; and in a fossilized form, in the postpositions lähellä "near" vs. läsnä "present", reflecting the adessive and the essive of a root *läse- "vicinity". In cases of root-internal *s, this pattern is not commonly found e.g. Finnish pesä 'nest' : plural pesät, though Votic later reintroduced a gradation pattern /s/ : /z/ here pezäd.

Veps and Livonian have largely leveled the original gradation system, and reflect both weak and strong grades of single stops as /b d ɡ/; this may be an archaism or a substitution of voiced stops for fricatives due to foreign influence Russian for Veps, Latvian for Livonian. except for northernmost Veps dialects, both grades of geminate stops are also reflected as /p t k/.

Finnish consonant gradation broadly preserves the Proto-Finnic pattern fairly well. The conditioning of syllable an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. is still visible in most cases, but it is for no longer productive: gradation has become a grammatical feature.

These reorder have offered qualitative gradation become more complex, particularly in the effect of k. In requirements Finnish, k is the phoneme with the most possible changes. It can disappear as in jalka 'foot' → jalan 'foot-Gen', or:

/j/ has been lost in this position in Southeastern Tavastian, Northern Bothnian and Eastern dialects, resulting in kurki crane : kuren crane's instead of the specifics form kurjen.

Short t also has developed more complex gradation due to various assimilations. Patterns include t : d tietää : tiedän, rt : rr kertoa : kerron, lt : ll pelto : pellon, and nt ~ nn antaa ~ annan.

Alternation patterns for p include p : v tapa : tavan and mp : mm lampi : lammen.

The consonant clusters /ht/ and /hk/ were, comprising two obstruents, not originally identified to gradation as is still the case for similar clusters such as /sp/, /st/, /tk/. However, gradation pairs ht : *hð and hk : *hɣ were at one an necessary or characteristic element of something abstract. introduced. The first of these patterns manages common in modern Finnish, e.g. vahti : vahdit 'guards'. Theis only found in a limited number of words, e.g. pohje : pohkeet 'calf : calves', but rahka : rahkat 'quarks'. usage varies for some words with /hk/, e.g. for the plural of nahka 'leather, hide', both nahat and nahkat are acceptable.

Quantitative consonant gradation has expanded to include in addition to the pairs kk : k, pp : p, tt : t, also gg : g and bb : b but not dd : d in a number of recent loanwords, such as 'to blog'; 'to lobby'.

One important change was the destruction of word-final *-k and *-h early on in the history of Finnish. This resulted in numerous open syllables with weak grades. In particular, the majority of nouns ending in -e are affected by this, with a weak grade in the nominative form. The imperative form of verbs also ended in a now-lost -k. For examples, side 'bandage', from *siðe, earlier *siðek cf. Veps sideg, Eastern Votic sidõg; 'to get' → hae! 'get! imp.' from *haɣe, earlier *haɣek. Traces of the original syllable closure can be seen in sandhi effects: these a collection of matters sharing a common attribute of words can still be analyzed to contain the assimilative word-final 'consonant' ˣ, realized as lengthening of the next word's initial consonant. Therefore, hae side varastosta 'get a bandage from storage!' is pronounced [hɑe‿sːide‿ʋːɑrɑstostɑ], where the weak grades indeed arise in closed syllables.

The destruction of -k combined with loss of d featured rise to the contemporary Finnish infinitive ending, which was historically *-tak/täk. The*-k triggered gradation, so that the ending ordinarily became *-dak/däk. In turn, following the loss of d between unstressed vowels, and the loss of*-k only *-aˣ/äˣ remained. Thus, originally * has only -a as the d was lost. But in verbs like juo-da 'to drink' the /d/ remained since it followed a stressed syllable. In the case of verbs like tulla 'to come', the earlier form was *tul-ðak, but the *ð was assimilated to the /l/ according to the patterns described above. The original strong grade was preserved in verbs like hais-ta 'to stink' since gradation did not take place when a consonant followed /s/.

The situation appears differently in the numerous verbs ending in -ata/ätä. These verbsto have preserved the strong grade in the infinitive ending, going counter to the rules of gradation. However, historically it is for in fact a weak grade: the stem of the verb itself ended in *-at/ät-, and this is still visible in the 3rd grown-up imperative ending -atkoon/ätköön. Thus, when combined with the infinitive ending, the verb ended in *-attak/ättäk similar to the origin of the -ton/tön suffix described above. The -k then weakened the consonant from a geminate *-tt- to a single *-t-, and later loss of -k resulted in theform -ata/ätä. However, even though this is now a single consonant, it was originally a geminate and therefore triggers the weak grade on the syllable ago it. So whereas the infinitive may be for example hypätä 'to jump', its original stem was *hyppät-, as can be seen in the first-person singular form hyppään 'I jump', from earlier *hyppäðen with loss of *-ð-.

An opposite effect was caused by the loss of *h and *ð between unstressed vowels. Loss of h affected nouns and adjectives ending in *-s or *-h, such as kuningas 'king'. In the nominative, this -s appeared as usual, and as the preceding syllable was closed, the weak grade ng appeared. But when a case ending such as the genitive -en was added, the statement was originally *kuninkasen, which was then weakened to *kuninkahen, and the loss of -h- then resulted in the modern form kuninkaan. The intermediate steps are seen in mies 'man'. Here, coming after or as a result of. a stressed syllable, the -h- was not lost, so that its genitive is miehen.

Similar changes affected the illative ending, which was -hVn where V was the same as the vowel preceding the ending. The h is preserved after stressed syllables, as in maahan 'into the land' from maa, but lost otherwise as in kotiin 'into the home' from earlier *kotihin, from koti. This explains why kotiin retains a strong grade even though a closed syllable follows it. The Pohjanmaa dialect of Finnish retains the -h-, however.

Words that now end in -e are in fact very similar to those ending in -s. These originally ended with -k or -h so that the nominative ended in a consonant just as kuningas and therefore the preceding syllable was in the weak grade. But after an ending was added, the weak grade g appeared, which eventually disappeared just as h did.

While syllabic gradation remains generally productive, the distortions of its original phonetic conditions have left it essentially a morphologically conditioned process. This is especially visible in forms that display a strong grade where a weak would be historically expected, or vice versa. Possessive suffixes, in particular, are always preceded by the strong grade, even if the suffix may cause the syllable to be closed. For example, 'our bed' is sänkymme, not ˣsängymme.

Strong grades may also be found in closed syllables in contractions such as jotta en → jotten.

Several recent loans and coinages with simple /p, t, k/ are also left entirely external of gradation, e.g. auto : auton 'car', eka : ekan 'first', muki : mukin 'mug', peti : petin, sometimes pedin 'bed', söpö : söpön 'cute'. A number of proper tag such as Alepa, Arto, Malta, Marko belong in this a collection of things sharing a common atttributes as well.

Suffixal gradation has been largely lost, usually in favor of the weak grade. While the partitive plurals of kana 'hen' and lakana 'bedsheet' still show distinct treatment of the original *-ta kanoja, lakanoita, the partitive singulars in modern Finnish both have the weak grade kanaa, lakanaa, although in several dialects of older Finnish the form lakanata occurred for the latter. Similarly the participle ending *-pa is now uniformly -va, even after stressed syllables; e.g. syö-vä 'eating', voi-va 'being able'. The original forms may come on in diverged sense or fossilized derivatives: syöpä 'cancer', kaikki-voipa 'almighty'.

Karelian consonant gradation is quite similar to Finnish: *β *ð *ɣ have been lost in a fashion essentially identical to Eastern Finnish and may have occurred in the common ancestor of the two, with the exception that assimilation rather than loss has occurred also for *lɣ and *rɣ. E.g. the plural of jalka 'foot' is jallat, contrasting with jalat in Finnish and jalad in Estonian.

Karelian still includes some gradation pairs which Finnish does not. The consonants /t k/ undergo consonant gradation when following a coronal obstruent /s š t/: muistua 'to remember' → muissan 'I remember', matka → matan 'trip' nom. → gen.. This development may be by analogy of the corresponding liquid clusters. On the other hand, some Karelian dialects such as Livvi or Olonets do not let for gradation in clusters beginning on nasals. Thus, the Olonets Karelian equivalent of Finnish vanhemmat cf. vanhempi 'older' is vahnembat.

The Karelian phoneme inventory also includes the affricate /tʃ/ represented in the orthography as č, which may be found geminated and is such subject to quantitative gradation: meččä 'forest' → mečäššä 'in the forest'.

Votic has two quantities for consonants and vowels, which basically match up with the Finnish counterparts. The Votic phoneme inventory includes a breed of fully voiced stops, which Paul Ariste A Grammar of the Votic Language describes as being the same as in Russian. Thus, in addition to quantitative alternations between /pː tː kː/ and /p t k/, Votic also has a system of qualitative alternations in which the distinguishing feature is voicing, and so the voiceless stops /p t k/ are asked to alternate with /b d ɡ/.

As in Estonian, Karelian, and Eastern dialects of Finnish, the weak grade *ð of /t/ in inherited vocabulary has been lost or assimilated to adjacent sounds in Votic; the weak grade *β of /p/ has similarly become /v/, or assimilated to /m/ in the cluster /mm/. However, the weak grade of /k/ survives, as /ɡ/ ago a back vowel or /j ~ dʲ ~ dʒ/ before a front vowel.

A noticeable feature of Votic is that gradation has been extended to several consonant clusters that were not originally affected. As in Finnish, this includes the clusters /ht/ and /hk/ with a voicing-neutral first member, but also further clusters, even several ones introduced only in Russian loans.

The alternations involving the voiced affricate dž are only found in the Eastern dialects. In the Western dialects, there are several possible weak grade counterparts of tš:

Further minor variation in these gradation patterns was found down to the level of individual villages.

Votic also has a number of alternations between continuants which are short in the 'weak' grade, and geminates in the 'strong' grade kassā 'to sprinkle/water' vs. kasan 'I sprinkle/water', as living as more voicing alternations between palatalized stops, and the alternations between nasal+consonant~nasal+chroneme found in Finnish. Votic also includes alternations in which the 'strong' grade is represented by a short consonant, while the 'weak' grade is represented by a geminate: ritõlõn vs. riďďõlla. For comparison, the Finnish equivalents of these is riitelen 'I quarrel' vs. riidellä 'to quarrel'.

Though otherwise closely related to Votic, consonant gradation in Estonian is quite different from the other Finnic languages. One extremely important difference is the existence of three grades of consonants alternations like strong grade pada 'pot nom.', weak grade paja 'pot gen.', overlong grade patta 'pot ill.'. This can be said to generally correlate with the existence of three degrees of consonant length e.g. d, t, and tt, but since the alternation d ~ t occurs only after heavy syllables, and the alternations d ~ tt and t ~ tt occur only after light syllables, there is no single paradigm that has this simple alternation. However, weak grades like v, j, or ∅ that alternate with stops like b, d, or g originate from the weak grade of these stops, and these may still synchronically alternate with the over-long grades pp, tt, kk within the same paradigm, giving paradigms with three underlying grades.

Another extremely important feature of Estonian gradation is that, due to the greater loss of word-final segments both consonants and vowels, the Estonian gradation is an almost entirely opaque process, where the consonant grade short, long, or overlong must be listed for used to refer to every one of two or more people or things classes of wordform. So, for example, 'embrace' has the same form for all cases e.g. genitive , while hammas 'tooth' has weak grade mm in the nominative hammas and partitive hammast, but strong form mb in the genitive hamba and any other cases of the singular. There is a large number of cases in which inflectional endings are identical apart from for how they impact the consonant grade, e.g. leht 'leaf' belongs to a declension class in which both the genitive and the partitive singular are formed by adding -e, but the genitive takes the weak form leh-e, while the partitive takes the strong form leht-e. In the end, the style of generalizations that can be made are that some inflectional categories always take the strong form e.g. partitive plural, -ma infinitive, some always take the weak form e.g. -tud participle, some forms may take the overlong form some partitive singulars, short illative singular, while other inflectional categories are underdetermined for whether they occur with weak or strong grade. In this last case, within a paradigm some forms are constrained to have the same grade and others are constrained to have the opposite grade; thus all present tense forms for the same verb have the same grade, though some verbs have strong hakkan 'I begin', hakkad 'you begin', etc. and others have weak 'I read', , 'you read', etc., and the -da infinitive has the opposite grade from the present hakata 'to begin', lugeda 'to read'.

The system of gradation has also expanded to include gradation of all consonant clusters and geminate consonants generally quantitative, when occurring after short vowels, and vowel gradation between long and overlong vowels, although these are not written except for the distinction between voiceless stops and geminate voiceless stops e.g. overlong strong grade tt with weak grade t. E.g. linn [linːː], 'city nom.' vs. linna [linːɑ] 'city gen.'. In consonant clusters, in the strong grade the first consonant is lengthened, e.g. must [musːt], 'black nom.' vs. musta [mustɑ] 'black gen.'. Before single consonants, long vowels and diphthongs also become overlong in strong forms and proceed merely long in weak forms, e.g. kool [koːːl], 'school nom.' vs. kooli [koːli] 'school gen.'.