Rick Derksen

Rick Derksen (born 1964) is a Dutch linguist and Indo-Europeanist at the University of Leiden who specializes in Balto-Slavic historical linguistics with an emphasis on accentology and etymology.

Derksen is a contributor to Leiden-based Indo-European Etymological Dictionary project, for which he wrote the Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (Brill, 2008) and the Etymological Dictionary of the Baltic Inherited Lexicon (Brill, 2015).

Derksen's law Overview

According to the law, the forms with the suffixes *-to-, *-sto-, *-tlo- had the Balto-Slavic final accent. In the Proto-Lithuanian language, the accent was retracted from short vowels to the previous syllable, as a result of which the accent appeared on the syllable with an unstressed acute transformed into circumflex.

Examples

Proto-Indo-European *bʰuHtlóm → Proto-Balto-Slavic *būˀtlá → Proto-Lithuanian *būtlás → (Derksen's law) Lithuanian bū̃klas; , сf. Proto-Slavic *bydlò.