Pinault's law

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 before *y. Compare:

• PIE *krewh̥₂s 'raw flesh; blood' > Vedic kravís, Ancient Greek κρέας (with the regular reflex of PIE syllabic laryngeal of Vedic -i- and Ancient Greek -α-)
• PIE *krewyo- > Vedic kravyás, Lithuanian kraũjas (with no -i- in Vedic, Lithuanian with circumflex accent and not acute which would have been yielded by a laryngeal)

References

• Pinault, G-J. (1982). A neglected phonetic law: The reduction of the Indo-European laryngeals in internal syllables before yod (Papers from the 5th International Conference on Historical Linguistics ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ahlqvist A. pp. 265–272.
• Kapović, Mate (2008). Uvod u indoeuropsku lingvistiku (in Croatian). Zagreb: Matica hrvatska. ISBN 978-953-150-847-6.