Talk:Consonant gradation

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.
 * Now attempting to fix some of these issues… still a lot of work to do, tho. In particular, the absense of treatment of Estonian is quite a serious flaw IMO; gradation in Samic could also use elaboration. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:43, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

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)

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)
 * Not exactly. I think that all of the information regarding Finnish should be moved to Finnish consonant gradation with a briefer version left here and a "see main article" link at the head of the Finnish section. – Dyolf87 (talk) 06:51, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

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)

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)

Splitting Germanic
I do not know Kroonen's exact arguments for extending this term to Proto-Germanic, but it seems to me this section would be better relocated elsewhere, e.g. in Proto-Germanic language or possibly Kluge's Law.

The term "consonant gradation" is not defined as some general class of consonant mutation. In its original sense, it refers to the common Finnic-Samic(-Nganasan) mutation system in particular (note that even unrelated Uralic consonant alternations, such as s/t alternation in Finnic, or various alternations found in e.g. Mari, are not included), which has some highly idiosyncratic conditioning and is generally thought to represent common inheritance to some extent. Germanic ticks off none of these boxes — this is an unrelated alternation in an unrelated family affecting unrelated words under unrelated conditions. Including it here just because it has been referred to by the same name is prone to sowing confusion about what consonant gradation is in the first place.

(A further precaution could be to rename this article something like "Uralic consonant gradation", or to split this further to a small overview + more detailed separate aricles, e.g. Finnic / Samic / Samoyedic, as we currently treat the Celtic initial mutations.)

-- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 17:38, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Finnish -iki- > -iji-?
I've noticed that in a few words when "k" drops out in the weak grade between two like vowels, an apostrophe is added to indicate a syllable boundary. For example there's vaaka ~ vaa'an and in the plural reikä ~ reiät ~ rei'issä. This is not done when two short vowels contract, like in haka ~ haan and koko ~ koon, so the assumption is that these vowels simply contract into a single long vowel. But I've noticed an exception to this rule in the word ikä, which also has an apostrophe in the plural, even though there are two short vowels: i'issä. I believe this would be in speech. There is of course also poika ~ pojan, where -ik- weakens to -j- orthographically, and I wouldn't be surprised if this also happens in reiät even though the spelling doesn't write the j (I am not a native Finnish speaker so I don't know the actual pronunciation). So this makes me wonder whether there is actually another pattern that is not indicated in spelling: -iki- ~ -iji- and -ik- ~ -ij-. This would certainly match the pattern -uku- ~ -uvu-, which also consists of two closed vowels straddling k. Does this make any sense? CodeCat (talk) 14:15, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * There's much variability among the Finnish dialects on this matter. In standard Finnish the weak grade singular stem of poika has been standardized as /poja-/, while the weak grade stem of reikä has been standardized as /reiä-/ (pronounced ); this however represents dialect mixture, and both poi(j)an and rejän are possible dialect forms (the latter fairly rare by now though I think).
 * The use of a apostrophe as the "weak grade" of k is a largely orthographical device: in spoken Finnish there is no single consistent pronunciation for words like i'issä. Both the bisyllabic /iissä/ (coinciding then with Iissä) and the trisyllabic /ijissä/ or /i.issä/ may be found in cases like this.
 * It's also worth noting that after /i/, how to interpret a "weak grade " is fairly arbitrary: no variety of Finnish distinguishes between /i.V/ vs. /ijV/. In the case of labial glides though, there is at least a clear phonetic difference between an epenthetic as in e.g. tiu'ut  and a phonemicized  as in e.g. luvut . Hauet vs. hauvat even provides a near-minimal pair (in some speakers' idiolects, at least). -- Trɔpʏliʊm  • blah 17:16, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Did you say 'precondition'
What do you mean exactly by that? because the link is to a programmation page with no linguistic content at all!

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Clarification would be helpful: gradation vs. "simple" allophony
"In its widest sense "consonant gradation" can be considered near-synonymous to "consonant alternation", covering a number of unrelated phenomena." Okay, yet "consonant gradation refers to a group of processes found in the Samic, Finnic and Samoyedic languages". True, but the reader is never fully informed of why this should be the case, i.e. why limited to those languages, since even the allophony of Tuscan (ˈ[kaːsa] 'house', [laˈhaːsa] 'the house', [akˈkaːsa] 'at home') would seem to be a manifestation of consonant gradation. Any chance of more explicit definition and exemplification so that the article can be digested by an undergraduate with little more knowledge than Intro to Linguistics? The main question is which sorts of alternations are to be considered gradation and which not -- and why. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 16:50, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * In Finnic and Samic, the gradation is grammatical and not phonological. There is no way to describe it with allophony, because there are words in which the grade is the only distinction in some cases. For example in Northern Sami, giella "language" is the nominative singular, but giela is the accusative and genitive singular. There is no ending to which the change in grade can be ascribed anymore, so there's no way to call this allophonic. In Finnish the situation is clearer as there is usually a syllable-final consonant which triggers the weak grade, or a long vowel which triggers the strong grade. However, there are tons of exceptions to this, e.g. säde and evätä with weak grades in open syllables. Furthermore there are words in Finnish which gradate, and words with identical consonants which do not gradate, meaning that the occurrence of gradation is an individual property of each word and not a phonological process. Rua (mew) 17:31, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, I knew most of that (in general terms). Please re-read what I had posted. My purpose was not a query for my own enlightenment but a suggestion for a clearer, more accessible article. An interested but inexperienced reader who doesn't already know what consonant gradation is customarily taken to mean, and the reasons both "data-based" and historically within the discipline for confining the label pretty much to a tight collection of languages, can quite likely be left puzzled by the article. What might that reader wonder about? Allophony, I should think; once that's sorted out, alternations such as English leaf-leaves, hoof-hooves (erstwhile allophony now crystallized, so that e.g. Toronto Maple Leafs is natural and unproblematic). Simple principle, really: write for the (uninitiated) readership. Hope this helps. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 19:56, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Should have mentioned also, with regard to the narrow focus in terms of languages in this article, v. Langacker, Ronald W. 1976. A note on Uto-Aztecan consonant gradation. International Journal of American Linguistics 42, No. 4, pp. 374-379, and references therein. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 13:46, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
 * This article covers consonant gradation in the Uralic languages. Other phenomena called "consonant gradation" in unrelated languages are out of scope and should be discussed in their own articles. Rua (mew) 13:49, 14 May 2019 (UTC
 * The article is entitled Consonant gradation. If the languages included are meant to be restricted to only a few that have consonant gradation, the title should indicate that. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 14:12, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I've edited the article to clarify. If the article title should indicate it as well, what would you suggest? Rua (mew) 16:06, 14 May 2019 (UTC)