During the Common Slavic period, a tendency known as the law of open syllables created the series of changes that completely eliminated closed syllables. This was evident in OCS, which had no closed syllables at all. Some of these changes include the monophthongization of diphthongs, loss of word-final consonants (e.g. 3rd person singular aorist OCS reče < *reket, OCS N sg of o-stems -ъ < *-us etc.), simplification of some medial consonant clusters (e.g. OCS tonǫti < *topnǫti etc.) and the formation of the nasal vowels *ǫ and *ę from *am/*an and *em/*en respectively.
Another change involved liquid consonants (R) *l or *r in closed-syllable *eRC and *aRC clusters, which were eliminated. The application of the law of open syllables for such clusters differed amongst the already differentiated Slavic dialects, but characteristically manifested in a number of dialects as the metathesis of liquid consonants, and is therefore called the liquid metathesis.
Read more about this topic: Slavic Liquid Metathesis And Pleophony
Famous quotes containing the words law of, law, open and/or syllables:
“Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“And now that the end is near
The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)