not found in Livonian and Veps. The fricatives later underwent further changes, and the dental and velar fricatives have been lost altogether in most Finnic varieties. The weakened grades of geminate consonants did not merge with the strong grades of the singleton consonants in Proto-Finnic, and still counted as geminates for the purposes of syllabification. There remained for a period an intermediate quantity, half-long *-t̆t-, which still closed the preceding syllable. Consequently, a syllable ending with a geminate in the weak grade still triggered a weak grade on the preceding syllable as well. In Finnish, the half-long consonants eventually merged with the strong-grade singleton consonants, but in most other Finnic languages, the strong-grade singletons underwent a secondary lenition which prevented this merger. Gradation later expanded to include a pattern *s ~ *h, presumed to reflect a former pattern *s ~ *z. This type of gradation only systematically appears in cases of word-final *s, which between vowels uniformly becomes *h: Finnish 'bush' has the genitive < . An example is also found after a stressed syllable, however, in the exceptional monosyllabic root *mees : *meehe- "man"; and in a fossilized form, in the postpositions lähellä "near" vs. läsnä "present", reflecting the adessive and the essive of a root *läse- "vicinity". In cases of root-internal *s, this pattern is not normally found (e.g. Finnish pesä 'nest' : plural pesät), though Votic later reintroduced a gradation pattern : here (pezäd). Veps and Livonian have largely leveled the original gradation system, and reflect both weak and strong grades of single stops as ; this may be an archaism or a substitution of voiced stops for fricatives due to foreign influence (Russian for Veps, Latvian for Livonian). Except for northernmost Veps dialects, both grades of geminate stops are also reflected as . Finnish Finnish consonant gradation generally preserves the Proto-Finnic pattern fairly well. The conditioning of syllable structure is still visible in most cases, but it is no longer productive: gradation has become a grammatical feature. Historical sound changes affecting realization of weak grades The weak grades *p̆p, *t̆t, *k̆k of geminates coincided with plain *p, *t, *k. The weak grades *mb, *nd, *ŋg of nasal+stop clusters were assimilated to geminate nasals , , (ng). The weak grades *lð, *rð of liquid+ clusters were similarly assimilated to geminate liquids , . *β merged with *ʋ (v). This may have been lost later. For example, the