Exempel på lenis

• Of particular interest was the three-way (lenis-fortis-aspirated) obstruent distinction, and geminate nasal consonants.

• While medial and final fortis stops are up to four times longer than lenis ones,13 duration is neutralised in initial position.

• Obstruents (stops, fricatives and affricates) were grouped into lenis, fortis and aspirated.

• Duration measurements, though, show solid and consistent length differences, with fortis stops being almost three times as long as lenis ones.

• This paper, however, will limit the discussion to the postlexical application of the tensing rule between phonological words, and after a lenis obstruent.

• The result is that voiceless fricatives are inherently rather than derivatively fortis whereas, parallel to the voiced series of stops, voiced fricatives are lenis and only weakly or coincidentally voiced.

• Fricatives include only lenis and fortis distinctions.

• Among obstruents, lenis is the most frequent.

• Regardless of the variable phrasing, however, we have shown that what changes the lenis stop into a tense stop depends on how speakers intonationally phrase the sentence.

• When the obstruction is released, the acoustic amplitude and vocal pitch of the following vowel becomes higher than for lenis sounds due to the longer duration of stop closure.

• These cross-linguistically attested patterns of partial or even full voicing in medial (specifically, intervoiced) position contrast sharply with the essentially voiceless realisation of the same lenis series in initial position.

• The target lenis stop is in bold.

• Thus, whether at the end of the word (4a) or at the end of a wordinternal syllable which is morpheme-final (4b), an underlying lenis (' voiced ') obstruent emerges as fortis ('voiceless').

• In other dialects fortis consonants are realized as having greater duration than the corresponding lenis consonant, invariably voiceless, vigorously articulated, and aspirated in certain environments.

• However, some speakers will place the "h" initial before another initial to indicate that that initial is fortis rather than lenis.