Lenis and Fortis.

Piotr writes:
 

Proto-Indo-European, as reconstructed with the help of the comparative method (I mean the most recent common ancestor of all the IE languages including Anatolian), was a stress language in which syllable strength was chiefly a matter of pitch differences and, presumably, of intensity (loudness).

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At this point I think I need another lesson regarding lenis and fortis. Fortis seems to describe volume (loudness), or the intensity of a puff of air. Lenis is the opposite of this, describing a reduction in volume or the intensity of the air flow. If I've gotten this right, then one example of this in English is the difference between an unexploded word-terminal d or t. If you say 'bad', and keep your tongue in place after articulating the d, the effect is quite different from what you do when you remove your tongue and let out a puff of air, particularly if you are being emphatic, in which case the puff of air takes a vowel-like quality. From what I've read, fortis and lenis is phonemic in one or more of the Celtic languages, at least historically (by this I mean you have minimal pair of words, distinguished solely by lenition and fortition).

There's a second question I want to ask, but I'm having a very difficult time formulating it. Mostly, it's what Beekes says, in section 11.4.8. I'm speaking of what has traditionally been referred to as the set of 'voiced aspirate' stops. Gamkrelidze et al. are said to reconstruct this as "voiceless aspirated stops, voiceless ejective stops and voiced aspirated stops" (EIEC, 'Proto-Indo-European', p. 461).  The second school, lead by Beekes, "have proposed a system of *p, *p’, and *bh " (id.) Beekes himself says "the last two were 'lenis' while the first was 'fortis'" (p.133), with the first being glottalized.

What I'm asking is if lenis/fortis was phonemic in PIE (and so far as I understand all this, it would seem to be). I also wonder if the fortis/lenis distinction needs to be interpreted as part of the PIE stress system.

My third point here is speculative, and may be based on my own ignorance of the facts. Elsewhere in the same article in EIEC, Douglas Adams speaks of PIE's use of grammatical gender. He says
 

the primary use of gender would seem to be demarcative. The agreement of adjectives an other modifiers with their head nouns delimits the scope of a particular noun phrase. When agreement stops, the speaker is inter alia signaling the end of a noun phrase. (p. 465)

Am I reading him right? Gender would seem to have developed out of a system devised in part to delimit a noun phrase from any other adjacent unit. Once such a feature developed, it's not difficult to see how it would be pressed into other duties, not the least of which is lexical.  Here I am engaging in a flight of fancy, taking the thought wherever it leads me. The earliest distinction between masculine and feminine would be an alternation between the O-vowels and A-vowels found in the daughter languages. It would have started as an allophonic variation, something coming out of existing stress patterns, and maybe even one of fortition and/or lenition.  In this context, it's almost easy to envision the stages whereby the masc/fem distinction became 'grammaticalized', mostly because you would have had a choice about what variation you would start with. It might have included the distinction found in other languages between women's speech and men's speech.
 
 

Mark Odegard.