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The motivation for asking this question was checking up on the Wikipedia page for Lentition, which says that it can involve "voicing a voiceless consonant", even though it's described as a process of weakening.

This feels unintuitive to me. Is this actually the case, and if so, why would a sound requiring less airflow be stronger than one requiring more?

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    A voiced consonant is weaker in the sense that it's more likely to be lost than a voiceless one. Lenition is I believe about increasing sonority
    – Someone211
    Commented Oct 20 at 9:26
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    Good question! If you think of consonants in terms of how different they are from their surrounding vowels (i.e., they’re defined by their contrastiveness), then it makes sense to say that voicing, which removes one feature by which they differ from vowels, is a form of ‘weakening’, since it reduces contrast.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 20 at 10:35

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It is mainstream phonology to distinguish “fortis” vs “lenis”, Latin for “strong” and “soft”. They refer to the force of articulation. In some languages, including English, /p/, /t/ and /k/ are fortis, voiceless and (usually) aspirated, while /b/ , /d/ and /g/ are lenis, voiced and unaspirated. In other languages, like Frech, the former series is fortis, voiceless and unaspirated, while the latter are lenis, voiced and unaspirated. There is thus no automatic correlation between aspiration and lenition.

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  • And in some languages, like Danish, the former series is traditionally considered lenis, voiceless and aspirated – though lenition still applies (in Danish by removing aspiration).
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 20 at 14:21
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    Whence "There is thus no automatic correlation between aspiration and lenition"? In both English and French, the fortes have longer aspiration and the lenes longer voicing.
    – Nardog
    Commented Oct 20 at 15:04
  • @Nardog. Aspiration in French? And what does longer mean?
    – fdb
    Commented Oct 20 at 17:17
  • In both languages, there is a correlation between VOT and "strength".
    – Nardog
    Commented Oct 20 at 17:40
  • @Nardog While French fortes do tend to have some (varying) aspiration, Spanish fortes usually have none (at least not detectable to the ear). As such, there is a correlation between VOT and strength, but not between aspiration and strength. There are also types of lenition that do not alter VOT at all; e.g., Finnish geminate stops leniting to single stops in consonant gradation, which reduces the occlusion phase but doesn’t affect the VOT after release.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Nov 19 at 17:30

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