Jakubinskij's law, or Meyer–Jakubinskij's law, is a

sound law In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic cha ...

that operated in the Croatian

Chakavian dialect Chakavian or Čakavian (, , , proper name: or own name: ''čokovski, čakavski, čekavski'') is a South Slavic supradialect or language spoken by Croats along the Adriatic coast, in the historical regions of Dalmatia, Istria, Croatian L ...

in the 12th and 13th centuries, named after who discovered it in 1925, and sometimes also after K. H. Meyer who expanded and refined the rule in 1926. Jakubinskij's law governs the distribution of the mixed Ikavian–Ekavian reflexes of Common Slavic

yat Yat or jat (Ѣ ѣ; italics: ''Ѣ ѣ'') is the thirty-second letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, old Cyrillic alphabet. It is usually Romanization, romanized as E with a haček: ''Ě ě''. There is also another version of y ...

phoneme, occurring in the Middle Chakavian area. In the Southern Chakavian Ikavian area, yat */ě/ was reflected as /i/, and became merged with the reflexes of

Common 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 ...

*/y/ and */i/. In the northwest, however, according to the Meyer–Jakubinskij's law, */ě/ > /e/ before dental consonants which were followed by one of the back vowels , and elsewhere */ě/ > /i/. This /e/ has thus merged the reflexes of Common Slavic */e/ and */ę/. Compare ''tȇlo'' 'body' as opposed to ''bīžéć'' 'fleeing'. The effect of Jakubinskij's rule has been levelled out in paradigmatic alternations and derivational morphology, by the analogical influence of nominative form onto the oblique cases, infinitive on other verbal forms, word stem onto derivations etc. Thus no or extremely little alternation occurs throughout the inflectional paradigm. For example, Common Slavic *město 'place, position' would yield N sg ''mesto'', but L pl is ''mestih'', not **mistih. L sg of ''mera'' (< Comm Slavic *měra 'measure') is ''meri'' not **miri etc. Though initially applied only to Chakavian Ikavian–Ekavian accents, this rule is also valid for some

Kajkavian Kajkavian is a South Slavic languages, South Slavic supradialect or language spoken primarily by Croats in much of Central Croatia and Gorski Kotar. It is part of the South Slavic dialect continuum, being transitional to the supradialects of Č ...

Ikavian–Ekavian accents of

Duga Resa Duga Resa is a town in Karlovac County, Croatia. It is located about 65 km southwest of Zagreb and 100 km east of Rijeka. Name The earliest reference to Duga Resa is from the year 1380. There are several theories on how the then-villag ...

Ogulin Ogulin () is a town in central Croatia, in Karlovac County. It has a population of 7,389 (2021) (it was 8,216 in 2011), and a total municipal population of 12,251 (2021). Ogulin is known for its historic stone castle, known as Kula, and the nearby ...

Karlovac Karlovac () is a city in central Croatia. In the 2021 census, its population was 49,377. Karlovac is the administrative centre of Karlovac County. The city is located southwest of Zagreb and northeast of Rijeka, and is connected to them via the ...

and Žumberak.

In popular culture

In 2023, the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal poked fun at Jakubinskij's Law, implying a pronunciation pattern in a defunct dialect does not deserve a named

scientific law Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. The term ''law'' has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow ...

Notes

References

* * Lav Jakubinskij (1925). ''Die Vertretung des urslav. ě im Čakavischen''. Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie 1, pp. 381–396
K.H. Meyer (1926). ''Beiträge zum Čakavischen''. Archiv für slavische Philologie 40, pp. 222–265
Croatian language Balto-Slavic sound laws {{historical-linguistics-stub