Pinault's law

Pinault's law is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) phonological rule named after the French Indo-Europeanist Georges-Jean Pinault ([pino] pee-no) who discovered it.

According to this rule, PIE laryngeals disappear between an underlying non-syllabic consonant (i.e. an obstruent or sonorant) and *y. Examples can be seen in the formation of imperfective verbs by appending *-yeti to the stem. Compare:

• PIE root *werh₁- 'to say' → imperfective *wéryeti 'to be saying' (cf. Ancient Greek εἴρω, eirō, 'to tell')
• PIE root *h₂erh₃- 'to plow' → imperfective *h₂éryeti 'to be plowing' (cf. Old Irish airid 'to be plowing')
• PIE root *snéh₁- 'to spin' → imperfective *snéh₁yeti 'to be spinning' (cf. Old Irish sníid, 'to spin'). Here the laryngeal */h₁/ is not deleted since it is preceded by a vowel.

References

• Pinault, G-J. (1982). A neglected phonetic law: The reduction of the Indo-European laryngeals in internal syllables before yod (Papers from the 5th International Conference on Historical Linguistics ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 265–272. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |agency= ignored (help)
• Kapović, Mate (2008). Uvod u indoeuropsku lingvistiku (in Croatian). Zagreb: Matica hrvatska. ISBN 978-953-150-847-6.
• Ringe, Donald A. (2017). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (2 ed.). Oxford. pp. 16–17. ISBN 978-0-19-183457-8. OCLC 979813633.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)