lenition

In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, 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 is found in most varieties of American English, in the form of tapping: the of a word like wait is pronounced as the more sonorous in the related form waiting . Some varieties 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 ("father", accusative) has become in Italian (an irregular change; compare "silk" > ) and Spanish (the latter weakened synchronically → ), while in Catalan , French and Portuguese historical has disappeared completely.