Bartholomae's law

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) An editor has performed a search and found that sufficient sources exist to establish the subject's notability. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Bartholomae's law" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Bartholomae's law" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article contains characters used to write reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words (for an explanation of the notation, see Proto-Indo-European phonology). Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode combining characters and Latin characters.

Bartholomae's law, sometimes referred to as the Buddha rule,^[1] is a Proto-Indo-European sound law affecting consonant clusters, most clearly in the Indo-Iranian languages. It states that in a cluster of two or more obstruents (stops or the sibilant *s), any one of which is a voiced aspirated stop anywhere in the sequence, the whole cluster becomes voiced and aspirated. Thus, to the Proto-Indo-European root *bʰewdʰ- 'learn, become aware of', the participle *bʰudʰ-to- 'enlightened' loses the aspiration of the first stop (following Grassmann's law) and with the application of Bartholomae's law and regular vowel changes gives Sanskrit buddha 'enlightened'. The law is named after German linguist Christian Bartholomae, who first described it in 1883.