Hirt's law
Encyclopedia
Hirt's law, named after Hermann Hirt
Hermann Hirt
Hermann Hirt was German philologist and Indo-Europeanist.- Biography :Hirt wrote on German metres , edited Schopenhauer's Parerga , and then devoting himself to Indo-Germanic philology made special studies on accent, writing Der indogermanische Accent and Der...

 who postulated it originally in 1895, is a Balto-Slavic
Proto-Balto-Slavic language
Proto-Balto-Slavic is reconstructed proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European and out of which all later Balto-Slavic languages and dialects descended, such as modern Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Russian.The Proto-Balto-Slavic language is not directly attested by any surviving texts...

 sound law which states in its modern form that the inherited Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

 stress would retract to non-ablauting pretonic vowel or a syllabic sonorant
Sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; fricatives and plosives are not sonorants. Vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like and . Other consonants, like or , restrict the airflow enough to cause turbulence, and...

 if it was followed by a consonantal (non-syllabic) laryngeal
Laryngeal theory
The laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...

 that closed the preceding syllable.

Compare:
  • PIE
    Proto-Indo-European language
    The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

    : } "smoke" (compare Sanskrit dhūmás and Ancient Greek thumós) > Lithuanian dū́mai, Latvian dũmi, Serbo-Croatian dȉm, Polish dym.
  • PIE } "neck; mane" (compare Sanskrit grīvā́) > Latvian grĩva, Serbo-Croatian grȉva, Polish grzywa.
  • PIE } "full" (compare Sanskrit pūrṇás) > Lithuanian pìlnas, Latvian pil̃ns, Serbo-Croatian pȕn, Polish pełny.


Hirt's law did not operate if the laryngeal preceded a vowel, or if the laryngeal followed the second component of a diphthong. Therefore, Hirt's law must be older than then the loss of laryngeals in prevocalic position (in glottalic theory
Glottalic theory
The glottalic theory holds that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , but not the murmured ones, , of traditional Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions....

 formulation: to the merger of glottalic feature of PIE voiced stops who dissolved into laryngeal and buccal part with the reflexes of the original PIE laryngeals), because the stress was not retracted in e.g. } (Ancient Greek tanaós, Sanskrit tanú) "thin" > Latvian tiêvs, and also older than the loss of syllabic sonorants in Balto-Slavic, as can be seen from the abovementioned reflexes of PIE }, and also in e.g. PIE } "long" (compare Sanskrit dīrghá, Ancient Greek dolikhós) > Lithuanian ìlgas, Latvian il̃gs, Croatian/Serbian dȕg.

It follows from the above that Hirt's law must have preceded Winter's law, but was necessarily posterior to Balto-Slavic oxytonesis (shift of stress from inner syllable to the end of the word in accent paradigms with end-stressed forms), because oxytonesis-originating accent was preserved in non-laryngeal declension paradigms; e.g. the retraction occurs in mobile *eh₂-stems so thus have dative plural of Slovene goràm and Chakavian goràmi (< PBSl. *-eh₂mús), locative plural of Slovene and Chakavian goràh (< PBSl. *-eh₂sú), but in thematic (o-stem) paradigm dative plural of Slovene možȇm (< PBSl. *-mús), locative plural of Slovene možéh and Chakavian vlāsíh (< PBSl. *-oysú). The retraction of accent from the ending to the vowel immediately preceding the stem-ending laryngeal (as in PBSl. reflex of PIE }) is obvious. There is also a strong evidence that the same was valid for Old Prussian (in East Baltic dative and locative plural accents were generalized in non-laryngeal inflections).

From the Proto-Indo-European perspective, the importance of Hirt's law lies in the strong correspondence it provides between the Balto-Slavic and Vedic/Ancient Greek accentuation (which more or less intactly reflects the original PIE state), and somewhat less importantly, provides a reliable criterion to distinguish the original sequence of *eH from lengthened grade *ē, as it unambiguously points to the presence of a laryngeal in the stem.
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