Adjarian's law

Adjarian's law is a sound law for Armenian language, according to which in certain dialects, initial-syllable vowels are fronted after consonants, reflecting the inherited Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiced aspirates. It was named after its discoverer, Hrachia Adjarian.

Compare:

as opposed to absence of vowel fronting after the non-aspirated voiced stops:

This conditioning is not a synchronic process, but rather reflects the quality of the original prevocalic consonant. In such cases the vowels first received the advanced tongue root ([+ATR]) feature in certain contexts, and the [+ATR] back vowels were then fronted. The dialect of Malatya preserves the intermediate stage, with [+ATR] vowels such as /ɑ̘/.

Adjarian's law in its full form appears mainly in dialects of the southern and eastern parts of the traditional Armenian dialect area, in modern-day southern Armenia and southwestern Turkey. An outlier is the Armenian community of Musaler on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.

Vaux (1992) proposes that the source of [+ATR] were simply the voiced stops such as /b/, /d/, as found in Classical Armenian: voiced stops often involve tongue root advancement. Garrett notes that Adjarian's Law is however never triggered by voiced stops that have developed from the Classical Armenian plain voiceless stops; but it also triggered by the breathy-voiced fricative /ɦ/ (which developed in the involved dialects from Classical Armenian /j/). He proposes that the voiced stop consonants that trigger it should be assumed to similarly have been breathy voiced [bʱ], [dʱ] by the time of Adjarian's law. Breathy voiced stops are recorded from several other dialects of Armenian; none of these however show Adjarian's law. Garrett interprets this to mean that Adjarian's law should be considered a type of rephonologization, where breathiness leads to [+ATR] only if it is simultaneously lost. According to Vaux, the relevant feature is instead the devoicing of the Classical Armenian voiced stops.

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