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Meillet's law is a Common Slavic accent law, named after the French Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, who discovered it.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(July 2024) |
Meillet's law is a Common Slavic accent law, named after the French Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, who discovered it.
According to the law, Slavic words have a circumflex on the root vowel (i.e., the first syllable of a word), if that word had a mobile accent paradigm in Proto-Slavic and Proto-Balto-Slavic, regardless of whether the root had the Balto-Slavic acute register. Compare:
Meillet's law should most probably be interpreted as polarization of accentual mobility in Slavic, due to which accent in the words with mobile accentuation had to be on the first mora, instead on the first syllable (in places in paradigm with initial accent). This is the reason in the words belonging to mobile paradigms in Slavic accent shifts from the first syllable to the proclitic, e.g. Russian accusative singular of mobile-paradigm gólovu, but ná golovu 'on the head', Serbo-Croatian glȃvu, but nȁ glāvu.
Meillet's law appears to not have taken effect in the infinitive of verbs. This form normally had ending accent in mobile paradigms, but some Balto-Slavic mobile verbs had root accent in the infinitive as a result of Hirt's law. In Slavic, these infinitives retained their acute accentuation, thus creating *gry̋zti next to the present *gryzèšь. [1] Such verbs appear synchronically to be a mixture of accent paradigms a and c.
A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch rather than by loudness or length, as in some other languages like English. Pitch-accent languages also contrast with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Standard Chinese, in which practically every syllable can have an independent tone. Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.
The history of the Slavic languages stretches over 3000 years, from the point at which the ancestral Proto-Balto-Slavic language broke up into the modern-day Slavic languages which are today natively spoken in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe as well as parts of North Asia and Central Asia.
This article describes the conjugation and use of verbs in Slovene. Further information about the grammar of the Slovene language can be found in the article Slovene grammar.
Proto-Balto-Slavic is a reconstructed hypothetical proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). From Proto-Balto-Slavic, the later Balto-Slavic languages are thought to have developed, composed of the Baltic and Slavic sub-branches, and including modern Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, among others.
Proto-Baltic is the unattested, reconstructed ancestral proto-language of all Baltic languages. It is not attested in writing, but has been partly reconstructed through the comparative method by gathering the collected data on attested Baltic and other Indo-European languages. It represents the common Baltic speech that approximately was spoken between the 3rd millennium BC and ca. 5th century BC, after which it began dividing into West and East Baltic languages. Proto-Baltic is thought to have been a fusional language and is associated with the Corded Ware and Trzciniec cultures.
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) has been reconstructed by linguists, based on the similarities and differences among current and extinct Indo-European languages. Because PIE was not written, linguists must rely on the evidence of its earliest attested descendants, such as Hittite, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin, to reconstruct its phonology.
Hirt's law or Hirt–Illich-Svitych's law, named after Hermann Hirt, who originally postulated it in 1895, is a Balto-Slavic sound law that triggered the retraction of the accent under certain conditions.
Pedersen's law, named after the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen, is a law of accentuation in Balto-Slavic languages which states that the stress was retracted from stressed medial syllables in paradigms with mobile accent.
Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual (stress) system of the Proto-Indo-European language.
In linguistics, Illič-Svityč's law refers to two Proto-Slavic rules, named after Vladislav Illich-Svitych who first identified and explained them.
Dybo's law, or Dybo–Illich-Svitych's law, is a Common Slavic accent law named after Soviet accentologists Vladimir Dybo and Vladislav Illich-Svitych. It was posited to explain the occurrence of nouns and verbs in Slavic languages which are invariantly accented on the inflectional ending. The latter is seen as an innovation from the original Proto-Balto-Slavic accent system, in which nouns and verbs either had invariable accent on the root, or "mobile" accent which could alternate between root and ending in the inflectional paradigm.
Ivšić's law, also Stang's law or Stang–Ivšić's law, is a Common Slavic accent law named after Stjepan Ivšić (1911) and Christian Schweigaard Stang (1957); the two linguists independently discovered the law in those years.
Lithuanian has eleven vowels and 45 consonants, including 22 pairs of consonants distinguished by the presence or absence of palatalization. Most vowels come in pairs which are differentiated through length and degree of centralization.
In the Lithuanian phonology, stressed heavy syllables are pronounced in one of two prosodically distinct ways. One way is known as the acute or falling accent: this may be described as "sudden, sharp or rough". In Lithuanian it is called tvirtaprãdė príegaidė, literally 'firm-start accent'. The second way is known as the circumflex or rising accent, which may be described as "continued, mild or smooth". In Lithuanian it is called tvirtagãlė príegaidė, literally 'firm-end accent'. Light syllables may be stressed or unstressed, but cannot be differentiated by accent.
Proto-Slavic is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium BC through the 6th century AD. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; scholars have reconstructed the language by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages and by taking into account other Indo-European languages.
Proto-Slavic accent is the accentual system of Proto-Slavic and is closely related to the accentual system of some Baltic languages with which it shares many common innovations that occurred in the Proto-Balto-Slavic period. Deeper, it inherits from the Proto-Indo-European accent. In modern languages the prototypical accent is reflected in various ways, some preserving the Proto-Slavic situation to a greater degree than others.
This glossary gives a general overview of the various sound laws that have been formulated by linguists for the various Indo-European languages. A concise description is given for each rule; more details are given in their articles.
The Proto-Slavic language, the hypothetical ancestor of the modern-day Slavic languages, developed from the ancestral Proto-Balto-Slavic language, which is the parent language of the Balto-Slavic languages. The first 2,000 years or so consist of the pre-Slavic era, a long period during which none of the later dialectal differences between Slavic languages had yet emerged. The last stage in which the language remained without internal differences that later characterize different Slavic languages can be dated around AD 500 and is sometimes termed Proto-Slavic proper or Early Common Slavic. Following this is the Common Slavic period, during which the first dialectal differences appeared but the entire Slavic-speaking area continued to function as a single language, with sound changes tending to spread throughout the entire area. By around 1000, the area had broken up into separate East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic languages, and in the following centuries it broke up further into the various modern Slavic languages of which the following are extant: Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn and Ukrainian in the East; Czech, Slovak, Polish, Kashubian and the Sorbian languages in the West, and Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian in the South.
In linguistics, metatony refers to the change of nature of accent, usually within the same syllable. When the accent also changes its syllable, the process is called metataxis. Metataxis can also be analyzed as a combination of accent movement and metatony. The term is usually used when referring to accentual developments in the history of Baltic and Slavic languages which exhibited numerous such developments, representing the accentual equivalent of sound change.
The Fortunatov–de Saussure law, or de Saussure's law, is an accentological law discovered independently by the Russian linguist Filipp Fortunatov (1895) and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1896).