Rick Derksen (born 1964) is a

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

linguist and

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 ...

at the

University of Leiden Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, as a reward to the city of Le ...

. He is specialist in

Balto-Slavic The Balto-Slavic languages form a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, traditionally comprising the Baltic and Slavic languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European bran ...

historical linguistics with an emphasis on

accentology Accentology involves a systematic analysis of word or phrase stress. Sub-areas of accentology include Germanic accentology, Balto-Slavic accentology, Indo-European accentology, and Japanese accentology. See also *Proto-Slavic accent Proto-Slavic ...

and

etymology Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the Phonological chan ...

. He's a contributor to Leiden-based Indo-European Etymological Dictionary project, for which he wrote the ''Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon '' (Brill, 2008) and the ''Etymological Dictionary of the Baltic Inherited Lexicon'' (Brill, 2015).

Derksen's law

Overview

According to the law, the forms with the suffixes ''*-to-'', ''*-sto-'', ''*-tlo-'' had the

final accent. Namely, in the ''Proto-Lithuanian'' language, the accent was retracted from short vowels to the previous syllable, as a result of which the accent appeared on the syllable with an unstressed acute transformed into circumflex.

Examples

* Proto-Indo-European ''*bʰuHtlóm'' → Proto-Balto-Slavic ''*būˀtlá'' → Proto-Lithuanian ''*būtlás'' → (Derksen's law) Lithuanian ''bū̃klas''; , ''сf.''

Proto-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 ...

''*bydlò''.

References

Living people Linguists from the Netherlands Academic staff of Leiden University 1964 births Linguists of Indo-European languages Balticists Slavists {{Netherlands-linguist-stub