'Free lenition' in Middle Welsh: problems of function and origin

Abstract

All conditions on Middle Welsh nasalization and spirantization and most conditions on Middle Welsh lenition are of the form: 'if a word follows morpheme X, its initial consonant is mutated'. This is contact mutation, whose origin can be traced back to phonetic properties of the proto-language. As a rule, contact mutation started life as a functionless morphophonemic property (in e.g. ry fawr 'too big' < *ro ma:ros lenition of mawr is a functionless morphophonemic property of ry), but it could acquire function as a result the loss of information in the word causing the mutation (as in e.g. y garr 'his car' as opposed to y charr 'her car' as opposed to y carr 'their car', where mutation determines the person, gender and number of the possessor; or in y frenhines fawr 'the big queen', where lenition indicates gender).