lenitionn.

?1541 R. Copland Galen's Fourth Bk. Terapeutyke sig. Fiij ^v, in Guy de Chauliac's Questyonary Cyrurgyens But of the cure of phlegmon by barly meale is sooner lenition than curacyon.

1912 F. W. O'Connell Gram. Old Irish 5 In Old Irish a single consonant between two vowels was more loosely articulated than in absolute anlaut, and this phonetic change has been termed both aspiration and lenition.

1913 J. M. Jones Welsh Gram. §103. 162 Continental scholars use ‘Lenition’ as a term embracing the Welsh ‘soft mutation’ and the corresponding Irish ‘aspiration’.

1935 Mod. Lang. Notes 50 518 The term lenition might to advantage have been recorded; in recent Celtic grammars this term has taken the place of the older aspiration.

1953 K. Jackson Lang. & Hist. in Early Brit. 424 IE. and Latin d..in lenition position initially and internally they became Late Brit. d.

1954 M. A. Pei & F. Gaynor Dict. Linguistics 121 Lenition, in Celtic languages, the phonetic change which consonants undergo when occurring between vowels, as well as the change of the initial consonant of a word under the influence of the final sound of the immediately preceding word.

1963 J. P. Hughes Sci. of Lang. xiv. 251 A tendency arises..to shift the single medial consonant to a spirant... This process is prominent in the Celtic languages, and is known as lenition.

1971 Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 17 17 There is some advantage to (1 a), which treats lenition in terms of point of articulation classes.