Meillet's law is a

Common Slavic Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium B.C. through the 6th ...

accent law, named after the French

Indo-Europeanist Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical pro ...

Antoine Meillet Paul Jules Antoine Meillet (; 11 November 1866 Moulins, France – 21 September 1936 Châteaumeillant, France) was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was ...

, who discovered it.

Overview

According to the law, Slavic words have a

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...

on the root vowel (i.e., the first syllable of a word), if that word had a mobile accent paradigm in

Proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the Attested language, unattested, linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately ...

and

Proto-Balto-Slavic Proto-Balto-Slavic (PBS or PBSl) is a linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed hypothetical proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE). From Proto-Balto-Slavic, the later Balto-Slavic languages are tho ...

, regardless of whether the root had the Balto-Slavic acute register. Compare: * acute on Lithuanian ''gálvą'', accusative singular of mobile-paradigm '' galvà'' 'head', vs. circumflex in Slavic (Serbo-Croatian '' glȃvu'', Slovenian '' glavô'', Russian '' gólovu'') * acute on Lithuanian '' sū́nų'', accusative singular of mobile-paradigm ''sūnùs'' 'son', versus circumflex in Slavic (Serbo-Croatian '' sȋna'', Slovenian '' sȋnu'') 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''.

In verbs

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 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 (or metatony in the valence theory) under certain conditions. Over ...

. In Slavic, these infinitives retained their acute accentuation, thus creating next to the present ''*gryzèšь''. Such verbs appear synchronically to be a mixture of accent paradigms ''a'' and ''c''.

References

* Proto-Slavic language Sound laws {{historical-linguistics-stub