Consonant Gradation - Finno-Samic Languages

Finno-Samic Languages

Consonant gradation in the Finno-Samic languages was originally triggered in two contexts:

1. When the consonant appeared at the beginning of a non-initial closed syllable
2. When the consonant appeared at the beginning of a non-initial secondarily stressed syllable

The first type is known as radical gradation or syllabic gradation. A syllable was closed if it ended in a consonant, which in particular always occurred with a word-final consonant, but also if vowels were separated by two or more consonants (including geminates).

The second type is known as suffixal gradation or rhythmic gradation. Stress originally fell on odd-numbered syllables, with the 1st syllable primarily stressed and the 3rd, 5th… syllables secondarily stressed.

The effect of gradation was a lenition of the consonant at the beginning of the syllable. Lenition caused geminate (long) stops to shorten, and it caused already-short voiceless obstruents to become voiced if they were not preceded by another obstruent:

• *pp → *p̆p
• *tt → *t̆t
• *kk → *k̆k
• *p → *b
• *t → *d
• *k → *g

The weakened grades of geminate consonants still counted as geminates for the purposes of syllabification. That is, a syllable ending with a geminate in the weak grade was still considered closed. One such example of these is the Finnish derivational suffix -ton/tön '-less'. When applied to the word tapa 'custom, practice', one would expect *tapaton when in fact it is tavaton. Historically this suffix was *-ttojn, with a long -tt-. When gradation was introduced, this was not immediately fully shortened, but remained for a period an intermediate quantity, *-t̆t-. This mid-length consonant was still able to trigger gradation of the root, and when they were changed to be realized as a short the effects on gradation remained, thus: *tapattoin → *tabat̆toin → tavaton. This change is also the cause for the present surface forms of the Finnish passive.