Pinault's law is a

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...

(PIE)

phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

rule named after the French Indo-Europeanist Georges-Jean Pinault who discovered it. According to this rule,

PIE A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit (as in an apple pie), nuts ( pecan pie), brown sugar ( sugar pie), swe ...

laryngeals The laryngeal theory is a theory in the historical linguistics of the Indo-European languages positing that: * The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) had a series of phonemes beyond those reconstructable by the comparative method. That is, the ...

disappear between an underlying non-syllabic (i.e. an

obstruent An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...

) and . Examples can be seen in the formation of imperfective verbs by appending '' to the stem. Compare: * PIE root '' '' 'to say' → imperfective '' '' 'to be saying' (cf. Ancient Greek '' εἴρω'' 'to tell') * PIE root '' '' 'to plow' → imperfective '' '' 'to be plowing' (cf. Old Irish '' airid'' 'to be plowing') * PIE root '' '' 'to spin' → imperfective '' '' 'to be spinning' (cf. Old Irish sniïd). Here the laryngeal is not deleted since it is preceded by a vowel.

References

* * * Proto-Indo-European language Sound laws {{ie-lang-stub