Pinault's law is a

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...

(PIE) phonological rule named after the French Indo-Europeanist

Georges-Jean Pinault Georges-Jean Pinault (born 4 July 1955) is professor of linguistics at the École pratique des hautes études.UMR 7528 - Mondes iranien et indienPinault, Georges-Jean/ref> He is one of the leading experts on Tocharian languages and has publishe ...

who discovered it. According to this rule,

PIE A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit (as in an apple pie), nuts (pecan pie), brown sugar ( sugar pie), sweete ...

laryngeals disappear between an underlying non-syllabic (i.e. an obstruent or

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels ar ...

) and . Examples can be seen in the formation of imperfective verbs by appending '' to the stem. Compare: * PIE root '' '' 'to say' → imperfective '' '' 'to be saying' (cf. Ancient Greek '' εἴρω'' 'to tell') * PIE root '' '' 'to plow' → imperfective '' '' 'to be plowing' (cf. Old Irish '' airid'' 'to be plowing') * PIE root '' '' 'to spin' → imperfective '' '' 'to be spinning' (cf. Old Irish sniïd). Here the laryngeal is not deleted since it is preceded by a vowel.

References

* * * Proto-Indo-European language Sound laws {{ie-lang-stub