Rick Derksen (born 1964) is a Dutch linguist and Indo-Europeanist at the

University of Leiden Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, as a reward to the city of L ...

. He is specialist in Balto-Slavic historical linguistics with an emphasis on accentology and

etymology Etymology () The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the form of words ...

. He's a contributor to Leiden-based

Indo-European Etymological Dictionary The ''Indo-European Etymological Dictionary'' (commonly abbreviated ''IEED'') is a research project of the Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, initiated in 1991 by Peter Schrijver and others. It is financiall ...

project, for which he wrote the ''Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon '' (Brill, 2008) and the ''Etymological Dictionary of the Baltic Inherited Lexicon'' (Brill, 2015).

Derksen's law

Overview

According to the law, the forms with the suffixes ''*-to-'', ''*-sto-'', ''*-tlo-'' had the Balto-Slavic final accent. Namely, in the ''Proto-Lithuanian'' language, the accent was retracted from short vowels to the previous syllable, as a result of which the accent appeared on the syllable with an unstressed acute transformed into circumflex.

Examples

* Proto-Indo-European ''*bʰuHtlóm'' → Proto-Balto-Slavic ''*būˀtlá'' → Proto-Lithuanian ''*būtlás'' → (Derksen's law) Lithuanian ''bū̃klas''; , ''сf.'' Proto-Slavic ''*bydlò''.

References

Living people Linguists from the Netherlands Academic staff of Leiden University 1964 births Linguists of Indo-European languages Balticists Slavists {{Netherlands-linguist-stub