A corpus-based study of lenition and fortition in Persian

Lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them more "sonorous". Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically and occurs especially often in intervocalic and postvocalic environment. The opposite of lenition is fortition, a consonant mutation in which a sound is changed from one considered "weak" to one considered "strong". As a research methodology, the deductive approach has been applied. Diverse resources such as books, papers and a corpus including 1459 verses have been used as reference. Firdausi's Shahnameh, Naser Khersou's 30 Odes and Sa′di’s Boostan, Middle and Contemporary Persian words were studied in order to evaluate the above methods in Persian and analyze features of each of them. The results showed that since 4th century, the frequency of lenition occurrence was significant, but the frequency of fortition occurrence was low; b) reviewing the Middle and Contemporary Persian words showed the high occurrence frequency of two processes.