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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.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 /iji-/ 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)
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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"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)