Misplaced Pages

Jakubinskij's law

Article snapshot taken from[REDACTED] with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Sound law
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (August 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (August 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
(Learn how and when to remove this message)

Jakubinskij's law, or Meyer–Jakubinskij's law, is a sound law that operated in the Croatian Chakavian dialect in the 12th and 13th centuries, named after Lev Jakubinskij [ru] who discovered it in 1925, and sometimes also after K. H. Meyer who expanded and refined the rule in 1926.

Jakubinskij's law governs the distribution of the mixed Ikavian–Ekavian reflexes of Common Slavic yat phoneme, occurring in the Middle Chakavian area.

In the Southern Chakavian Ikavian area, yat */ě/ was reflected as /i/, and became merged with the reflexes of Common Slavic */y/ and */i/. In the northwest, however, according to the Meyer–Jakubinskij's law, */ě/ > /e/ before dental consonants {d, t, s, z, n, l, r} which were followed by one of the back vowels {a, o, u, y, ъ}, and elsewhere */ě/ > /i/. This /e/ has thus merged the reflexes of Common Slavic */e/ and */ę/.

Compare tȇlo 'body' as opposed to bīžéć 'fleeing'.

The effect of Jakubinskij's rule has been levelled out in paradigmatic alternations and derivational morphology, by the analogical influence of nominative form onto the oblique cases, infinitive on other verbal forms, word stem onto derivations etc. Thus no or extremely little alternation occurs throughout the inflectional paradigm. For example, Common Slavic *město 'place, position' would yield N sg mesto, but L pl is mestih, not **mistih. L sg of mera (< Comm Slavic *měra 'measure') is meri not **miri etc.

Though initially applied only to Chakavian Ikavian–Ekavian accents, this rule is also valid for some Kajkavian Ikavian–Ekavian accents of Duga Resa, Ogulin, Karlovac and Žumberak.

In popular culture

In 2023, the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal poked fun at Jakubinskij's Law, implying a pronunciation pattern in a defunct dialect does not deserve a named scientific law.

Notes

  1. All of Southern Chakavian area is Ikavian, except for Lastovo, just as most of the Western Shtokavian speeches.
  2. Mihaljević (2002, p. 216)
  3. Mark Lieberman (2023-02-05). "Language Log - Linguistic Laws". University of Pennsylvania.

References

Stub icon

This article about Slavic languages is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Stub icon

This article about historical linguistics is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Categories:
Jakubinskij's law Add topic