Lenition
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Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. The name lenition appears especially, but not exclusively, in the context of Celtic languages such as Welsh, in which it is pervasive.
Lenition means 'softening' or 'weakening' (from Latin lenis, as in the root of 'lenient'), and it refers to the change of a consonant considered 'strong' into one considered 'weak' (fortis → lenis). The criteria for deciding whether a consonant is one or the other kind are variable, but in general, the scale goes like this: voiceless stops (/p t k/) → voiced stops (/b d g/) → voiced fricatives (/v ð ɣ/).
Synchronical lenition happens in the Celtic languages, where it's conditioned by grammatical rules (for example, the initial consonant of a noun is lenited, if applicable, when preceded by an article). Diachronical lenition is found, for example, in the change from Latin into Spanish, where word-medial intervocalic voiceless stops (/p t k/) changed into their voiced counterparts (vita → vida, caput → cabo, caecus → ciego).