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Meillet's law is aCommon Slavic accent law, named after the French Indo-EuropeanistAntoine Meillet, who discovered it.
According to the law, Slavic words have acircumflex on the root vowel (i.e., the first syllable of a word), if that word had amobile accent paradigm inProto-Slavic andProto-Balto-Slavic, regardless of whether the root had theBalto-Slavic acute register. Compare:
Meillet's law should most probably be interpreted as polarization of accentual mobility in Slavic, due to which accent in the words with mobile accentuation had to be on the firstmora, instead on the first syllable (in places in paradigm with initial accent). This is the reason in the words belonging to mobile paradigms in Slavic accent shifts from the first syllable to the proclitic, e.g. Russian accusative singular of mobile-paradigmgólovu, butná golovu 'on the head', Serbo-Croatianglȃvu, butnȁ glāvu.
Meillet's law appears to not have taken effect in the infinitive of verbs. This form normally had ending accent in mobile paradigms, but some Balto-Slavic mobile verbs had root accent in the infinitive as a result ofHirt's law. In Slavic, these infinitives retained their acute accentuation, thus creating*gry̋zti next to the present*gryzèšь.[1] Such verbs appear synchronically to be a mixture of accent paradigmsa andc.