The ''boukólos'' rule is a

phonological Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...

rule of the

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

(PIE). It states that a labiovelar stop (, , ) dissimilates to an ordinary velar stop (, , ) next to the vowel or its corresponding glide . The rule is named after an example, the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

word (; from

Mycenaean Greek Mycenaean Greek is the earliest attested form of the Greek language. It was spoken on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece (16th to 12th centuries BC). The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first atteste ...

''qo-u-ko-ro'' ) "cowherd", ultimately from Proto-Indo-European , dissimilated from . If the labiovelar had not undergone dissimilation, the word should have turned out as *, as in the analogously constructed () "goatherd" < . The same dissimilated form is the ancestor of

Proto-Celtic Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, is the hypothetical ancestral proto-language of all known Celtic languages, and a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. It is not attested in writing but has been partly Linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed throu ...

, the source of Welsh (which would have had rather than if it had come from a form with ) and Irish , which is the common word for "boy" in the modern language. Another example could be the Greek negation (), which

Warren Cowgill Warren Crawford Cowgill ( ; December 19, 1929 – June 20, 1985) was an American linguist. He was a professor of linguistics at Yale University and the Encyclopædia Britannica's authority on Indo-European linguistics. Two separate Indo-Europea ...

has interpreted as coming from pre-Greek < , meaning approximately "not on your life". Without the ''boukólos'' rule, the result would have been * (). The rule is also found in Germanic, mainly in verbs, where labiovelars are delabialised by the epenthetic -u- inserted before syllabic resonants: * Old High German ("to come"), past participle ("come"), from Proto-Germanic and * Gothic , Old High German ("to see"), past plural OHG ("saw"), from Proto-Germanic and ( results from earlier through Verner's law)

References

Indo-European sound laws {{historical-linguistics-stub

See also

References