Meillet's law is a
Common Slavic accent law, named after the French Indo-Europeanist
Antoine Meillet, who discovered it.
Overview
According to the law, Slavic words have a
circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...
on the root vowel (i.e., the first syllable of a word), if that word had a
mobile accent paradigm 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 ...
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 ...
, regardless of whether the root had the
Balto-Slavic acute register. Compare:
* acute on Lithuanian ''gálvą'', accusative singular of mobile-paradigm ''
galvà'' 'head', vs. circumflex in Slavic (Serbo-Croatian ''
glȃvu'', Slovenian ''
glavô'', Russian ''
gólovu'')
* acute on Lithuanian ''
sū́nų'', accusative singular of mobile-paradigm ''sūnùs'' 'son', versus circumflex in Slavic (Serbo-Croatian ''
sȋna'', Slovenian ''
sȋnu'')
Meillet's law should most probably be interpreted as polarization of accentual mobility in Slavic, due to which accent in the words with mobile accentuation had to be on the first ''mora'', instead on the first syllable (in places in paradigm with initial accent). This is the reason in the words belonging to mobile paradigms in Slavic accent shifts from the first syllable to the proclitic, e.g. Russian accusative singular of mobile-paradigm ''gólovu'', but ''ná golovu'' 'on the head', Serbo-Croatian ''glȃvu'', but ''nȁ glāvu''.
In verbs
Meillet's law appears to not have taken effect in the infinitive of verbs. This form normally had ending accent in mobile paradigms, but some Balto-Slavic mobile verbs had root accent in the infinitive as a result of
Hirt's law. In Slavic, these infinitives retained their acute accentuation, thus creating next to the present ''*gryzèšь''.
Such verbs appear synchronically to be a mixture of accent paradigms ''a'' and ''c''.
References
*
{{Slavic languages
Balto-Slavic sound laws
Slavic phonological features