Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Articulated with relatively low pressure of the airstream below the glottis, as English (b) and (d) compared with (p) and (t).
Wiktionary
- adj. phonetics weakly articulated (of a consonant), hence voiced; especially as compared to the others of a group of homorganic consonants.
Etymologies
- Latin lenis ("soft, smooth"). (Wiktionary)
- Latin lēnis, soft; see lē- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The fortis stops, being marked, are much less frequent and have greater restrictions than the 'lenis' stops such as *t or *dh in the traditional notation.”
“We can see that unaspirated stops are probably "lenis" i.e. requiring comparatively less articulatory effort while aspirated stops are "fortis".”
“Here are all of the Latin words that could conceivably be translated into English as "kind": pius, lenis, genus, comis, benignus, benignitas, beneficus, et almus.”
“The only thing that could be said about Hittite writing of fortis-lenis distinction is that in writing it looks like all initial consonants are lenis.”
“Phoenix: "But if there was a fortis-lenis distinction word initially, I guess we would expect Hittite to make use of the voicing distinction the writing system did have.”
“But if there was a fortis-lenis distinction word initially, I guess we would expect Hittite to make use of the voicing distinction the writing system did have.”
“Secondly, if Hittite had lost voicing as a distinctive feature of the language, let's say, while retaining fortis-lenis contrast word-initially, then using voicing distinctions in a foreign system may not have necessarily appealed to the Hittite scribes.”
“Northern and much of central German have a voice-and-aspiration contrast like English, southwestern German has a length contrast, and southeastern German has a pure fortis-lenis contrast in those dialects that have any constrast at all...”
“Again, the dreaded "North Caucasian *ƛ̣_VẋwV ( ˜ Ł_-)" contains only two wildcards (the two instances of V) and uncertainty about whether the initial consonant was ejective or voiced (in other words, it was not aspirated; unlike American ones, Caucasian ejectives are lenes, not fortes, so I'm not terribly surprised it's not always possible to tell if such a lenis was voiced or ejective).”
“I think this shows a ‘prescriptive’ attitude in which the RP speakers think that the rolled ‘r’ is the ‘correct’ one and, therefore, elevated pronunciation deserves the ‘fortis’ as opposed to ‘lenis’ realization of the sound.”
The Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation | Linguism | Language Blog
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘lenis’.
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