Talk:Consonant gradation

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Contents 1 Serious lacks 2 Rewrite in process 3 Finnish Consonant Gradation 4 Why k - v 5 Merger?

[edit] Serious lacks

This article is extremely messy and would need to be completely rewritten. At least the following are serious lacks:

- The (historical or synchronic) conditioning of consonant gradation, i.e. open vs. closed syllables is not explained.

- The difference between the two principal types of gradation (radical vs. suffixal) is not explained.

- The article mixes the synchronic descriptions of gradation together with explanations of their historical development in a way that is most confusing.

- There are also many minor errors, e.g. the postulation of an unvoiced dental spirant as the historical weak grade of t, and the claim that -e- in Suomen "Finland (GenSg)" is an epenthetic vowel.

[edit] Rewrite in process

I'm going to start rewriting this article as I agree that it is very messy, and it sort of misses the breadth and scope of the topic in general. For one, it is too heavy on Finnish, but before that can be proven the Finnish part of it must be edited before it can be merged with the topic in Finnish Phonology. As for what consonant gradation is concerned with, this is indeed a phenomenon across Finnic languages. As someone who is concerned mostly with Finnic languages, I'm going to see what I can pull in from my resources to describe the phenomenon. I realize I should just get to writing this, but I thought I'd mention that something will be going on very soon.

Generally though, if we're going to talk about Finnish in this article, I think historical aspects of the actual realization of phonemes should be avoided at all costs. Historical aspects however are important to the description of Finnish C.G., however not important from a pedagogical standpoint (students for instance can just be told that X happens in Y and W and Z cases, and that's all they care). From a descriptive standpoint this is important, and I have a feeling this article should seek to describe the phenomenon. Anyway, that's important to mention because I want to see if anyone has arguments about ditching the mention of chroneme, in addition to focusing on standard Finnish-- that's not to say dialects have to be left out (they've got some interesting features), but I think for the sake of consistancy and being concise it's best to avoid that to describe the general phenomenon. --Ryan 23:13, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Finnish Consonant Gradation

Attempting to clean up this article by isolating the wealth of information in this article that deals purely with Finnish. Does anyone think some of it could be moved to the finnish language article? --Ryan 13:31, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why k - v

I have repeatedly replaced attempts to remove the k - v alteration as an example. The problem with k - g and t - d is that these are not phomemic distinctions in Finnish, in the context of this article, whereas k - v is always phonemic. That is to say, there are no (etymologically original) minimal pairs like die - tie in Finnish, but there are distinctions like kuole "die" - vuole "carve". Only later development, namely influence from Swedish, has resulted in pairs like kadon "of the loss" - katon "of the roof". Yet this is not the original distinction [t] - [ð]. There's one more problem with using the examples which contrast voicing: it can give the impression that only voicing is changed, particularly to people who: 1) don't know that Finnic languages don't really contrast voicing and 2) are unfamiliar with the terms "qualitative" and "quantitative". --Vuo 20:45, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing it up. I reverted the change once because I guess I was confused at what the point of changing it was at first; my idea was just to show what qualitative means vs. quantitative in a general context not necessarily with the framework of gradation pairs available. If there's anything else that stands out as something that someone from the field might not understand, please write something in; I'm kind of wearing my rose-tinted glasses of Finnic studies here.----Ryan 08:34, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merger?

Consonant mutation, Consonant gradation, Spirantization, Lenition, Fortition and Fortis and lenis all seem to be about the same kind of phenomenon. Perhaps they should be merged. FilipeS 21:27, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm afraid you're mistaken - they are not about the same kind of phenomenon, and there is no reason whatsoever to merge these. Consonant gradation refers to a very specific type of morphophonological alteration found in Finnic, Saami and Samoyed languages, as explained in the article. Celtic consonant mutations are a specific (and different!) type of morphophonological alteration, and they are not at all similar to consonant gradation either in their mechanism or their effects. As for lenition, fortition, and spirantization, these generally refer to types of sound change, not alterations. --AAikio 08:17, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

If there is a difference between consonant mutation and consonant gradation, that difference should be explained in at least one of the two articles. No such explanation currently exists.

P.S. This is being discussed in the Talk Pages of the other articles, as well. FilipeS 23:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Ok, first, sorry for my somewhat inexact first reply. I now notice that the article consonant mutation is not only about the Celtic mutations, but morphophonological alterations of consonants in general. But still, I don't think these could be merged. First of all, this article is already too long to be merged with any more general topic such as the one covered by consonant mutation. Moreover, this would also be terminologically an odd choice, because 'consonant gradation' is a universally used term of these alterations in Finnish and Saami, whereas the term 'consonant mutation' is almost never used in reference to Finnish or Saami.

Another thing is that this article would really need improvement. The definition given to consonant gradation in the beginning should be clarified, and it would be good to give an example of gradation early on in the article.--AAikio 12:28, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Feel free to edit it as you see fit. You've given a good definition already in your comments here that you should consider editing in! --Ryan 23:57, 12 November 2006 (UTC)