Pinault's law

Pinault's law is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) phonological rule named after the French Indo-Europeanist Georges-Jean Pinault who discovered it.

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


 * PIE root wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/werh₁- 'to say' → imperfective wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/wéryeti 'to be saying' (cf. Ancient Greek εἴρω 'to tell')
 * PIE root wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h₂erh₃- 'to plow' → imperfective wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h₂éryeti 'to be plowing' (cf. Old Irish airid 'to be plowing')
 * PIE root wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/(s)néh₁- 'to spin' → imperfective wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/(s)néh₁yeti 'to be spinning' (cf. Old Irish sniïd). Here the laryngeal is not deleted since it is preceded by a vowel.