Havlík's law is a Slavic rhythmic law dealing with the reduced vowels (known as
yers or jers) in
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 BC through the 6th ...
. It is named for the Czech scholar Antonín Havlík (1855–1925), who determined the pattern in 1889. While Havlík's law was a precursor to the loss of the yers, that process is part of the individual history of the various Slavic languages. Havlík's law was already in effect at the end of the
Common Slavic period, and ended the era of the "law of open syllables", a major phonological innovation of the Common Slavic period.
Strong and weak yers
The front and back
yer come from the Early Proto-Slavic and
Proto-Balto-Slavic
Proto-Balto-Slavic (PBS or PBSl) 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 Sla ...
short high vowels */i/ and */u/, respectively. As vowels, they played a role in the law of open syllables, which states that every syllable must end in a vowel.
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic ( ) is the first Slavic languages, Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the South Slavic languages, South Slavic subgroup of the ...
, for example, had no closed syllables at all.
Word-final yers, which were abundant, including in declensional patterns, were reduced in length to ultrashort, or "weak", variants (/ɪ̆/ and /ʊ̆/). These weak yers were then often
elided. In words with multiple yers, the weak variants were not limited to word-final position.
Havlík's law describes the pattern in which weak and strong yers occur. Counting from the last yer in a word, the final yer is weak, the previous yer is strong, the previous yer is weak, etc., until a full vowel is reached, and then the pattern is started again with alternating weak then strong yers.
References
* Schenker, Alexander M. (1995). ''The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology.'' New Haven: Yale University Press. .
* Townsend, Charles and Laura Janda (1996). ''Common and Comparative Slavic Phonology and Inflection: Phonology and Inflection: With Special Attention to Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian.'' Bloomington, IN: Slavica. .
{{DEFAULTSORT:Havlik's law
Balto-Slavic sound laws
Slavic phonological features