- Pedersen's law
Pedersen's law, named after Danish linguist Holger Pedersen, is a Balto-Slavic accent law which states that the stress was retracted from stressed medial syllables in Balto-Slavic mobile paradigms. Originally it was proposed by de Saussure for Baltic to explain forms such as Lithuanian "dùkterį", "dùkteres" (cf. Ancient Greek "thugatéra", "thugatéres"), but was later generalized in 1933 to Balto-Slavic by Pedersen, who then assumed that mobility was spread from the consonant-stems to Balto-Slavic eh₂-stems and o-stems. The term "Pedersen's law" is also applied to later Common Slavic developments in which the stress retraction to prefixes/proclitics can be traced in mobile paradigms, such as Russian "ná vodu" "onto the water", "né byl" "was not", "pródal" "sold", "póvod" "rein" etc.
Proto-Indo-European *PIE| "daughter", with accusative singluar *PIE|dʰugh₂térm̥ (Ancient Greek , acc. sg. ) > Lithuanian "duktė̃", acc. sg. "dùkterį".
Proto-Indo-European *poh₂imń̥ ~ *poh₂imén "shepherd" (Ancient Greek , accusative singluar "poiména") > Lithuanian "piemuõ", acc. sg. "píemenį".
Proto-Indo-European *gʰolHwéh₂ with Balto-Slavic semantics of "head" > Lithuanian "galvà" (with accusative singular "gálvą"), Russian (acc. sg. "gólovu"), Chakavian "glāvȁ" (acc. sg. "glȃvu").
Within relative chronology of Balto-Slavic sound changes this law was, in it's first occurrence in Balto-Slavic period, posterior to the loss of Proto-Indo-European accentual mobility (i.e. after the advent of Balto-Slavic mobile paradigms as the mentioned Lithuanian "duktė̃", as opposed to non-final stress in Ancient Greek etymon), so it's application was originally limited to the inflection of polysyllabic consonant stems.
Later the retraction of stress spread analogically to non-consonant stems in case forms where Pedersen's law applied (commonly termed "barytonesis"). Thus we have accusative singular forms of Lithuanian "ãvį" "sheep", "sū́nų" "son", "diẽvą" "god", "žiẽmą" "winter". Aftwerards the oxytonesis,
Hirt's law andWinter's law applied.References
* Holgar Pedersen, Études lituaniennes (København: Levin & Munksgaard), 1933:25
* [http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/sa/ Slavic Accentuation - A Study in Relative Chronology] , Frederik Kortlandt, 1975
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