Dybo's law

Dybo's law, or Dybo-Illič-Svityč's law, is a Common Slavic accent law named after Russian accentologists Vladimir Dybo and Vladislav Illich-Svitych.

According to the law, the accent was shifted rightward from a non-acute syllable (i.e. a long circumflex syllable, or a short syllable) to the following syllable if the word belonged to the non-mobile accentual paradigm. This produced the difference between the later accent classes A and B. The length of the previously-accented syllable remains. This is in fact the primary source of pre-tonic length in the later Slavic languages (e.g. Serbo-Croatian), because inherited Balto-Slavic vowel length had previously been shortened in pre-tonic syllables, without a change in vowel quality. (This caused the phonemicization of the previously automatic quality variations between short and long vowels — e.g. short *o vs. originally long *a.) When the newly stressed syllable was long, the accent was subsequently shifted leftward again by Stang's law, resulting in a neoacute accent.

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