Pinault's law explained

Pinault's law is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) phonological rule named after the French Indo-Europeanist Georges-Jean Pinault who discovered it.

According to this rule, PIE laryngeals disappear between an underlying non-syllabic consonant (i.e. an obstruent or sonorant) 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

• Book: Pinault, G-J. . A neglected phonetic law: The reduction of the Indo-European laryngeals in internal syllables before yod . Ahlqvist A. . Papers from the 5th International Conference on Historical Linguistics . Amsterdam . 1982 . John Benjamins . 265–272.
• Book: Kapović, Mate . Uvod u indoeuropsku lingvistiku . . . 2008. 978-953-150-847-6. hr.
• Book: Ringe, Donald A. . From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic . 2017 . 978-0-19-183457-8 . 2 . Oxford . 979813633 . 16–17.