PIE syllabification of sonorants

Siever’s law

Siever’s law, in its most simple formulation, can be stated as follows

Siever’s Law (simple version) :: If a non-syllabic sonorant is preceded by a Heavy syllable, it becomes syllabic.

where, in PIE, a ”heavy syllable” may be understood as one containing a long vowel and a terminal non-syllabic, or more than one terminal non-syllabic.¹

• nept-yó-s → ==neptiós==

It appears that in all attested daughter languages the rule remained productive only for /w/ and especially /y/.

It has been proposed that Lindeman’s option may have arisen as a special case of Siever’s law.

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Footnotes

1. 2017, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, pp. 18–19 ↩