Word.ws English Dictionary

Hirt's law

Hirt's law proper noun: a Balto-Slavic sound law stating that the inherited Proto-Indo-European stress would retract to a non-ablauting pretonic vowel or a syllabic sonorant if it was followed by a consonantal (non-syllabic) laryngeal that closed the preceding syllable.

Proper noun

Hirt's law

  1. A Balto-Slavic sound law stating that the inherited Proto-Indo-European stress would retract to a non-ablauting pretonic vowel or a syllabic sonorant if it was followed by a consonantal (non-syllabic) laryngeal that closed the preceding syllable.

Origin of Hirt's law

Named after Hermann Hirt, who postulated it in 1895.

Questions about Hirt's law

What does Hirt's law mean?
Hirt's law means a Balto-Slavic sound law stating that the inherited Proto-Indo-European stress would retract to a non-ablauting pretonic vowel or a syllabic sonorant if it was followed by a consonantal (non-syllabic) laryngeal that closed the preceding syllable.
What part of speech is Hirt's law?
Hirt's law is a proper noun.

Words near Hirt's law in the dictionary

  1. hirsutisms
  2. hirsutoid
  3. hirsutoid papillomas
  4. hirsutoid papillomatosis
  5. hirsutulous
  6. Hirt's law
  7. hirtellous
  8. Hirth
  9. Hirths
  10. hirtillous
  11. Hirtle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Hirt's law (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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