Today, a long guest posting on intellectual history, specifically on the transmission of ideas in linguistics, in particular on the innovation and spread of linguistic terminology. This is an immensely scholarly follow-up to my 4/15/24 posting “Greek-letter variables and the Sanskrit ruki class”, in which I reproduced a 1970 Linguistic Inquiry squib of mine with that title and wrote:
and then there’s the question of the useful ruki terminology, whose history [the Indo-Europeanist Michael L. Weiss (Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Cornell)] has been trying to trace (this squib might have been the source of its spread throughout the linguistic literature)
Today’s guest post is the current fruit of Michael Weiss’s RUKIstorical investigations, with minimal intrusions in his text by comments from me.
The Story of RUKI
The Discoverers
Since the days of Pāṇini (4th cent bce?) it’s been clear to linguists that in Sanskrit the alveolar sibilant s becomes a retroflex ṣ when following the vowels ī̆, ū̆ (including monophthongized e and o < *ai̯ and *au̯), r/r̥, and k. Pāṇini himself declares (8.3.57), that this change happens in the environment defined as iṆkU, a Pāṇinian cover term made up of iṆ (=vowels other than ā̆ plus r) and kU ( = velar stops). Pāṇini’s rule is now known to reflect a change of at least Proto-Indo-Iranian date since Old Iranian has precisely the same distribution of h ( < PIIr. *s) and š (< PIIr. *š) as Sanskrit. It took another 2300 years or so before the great Danish linguist Holger Pedersen established in 1895 that Proto-Slavic *s became *x (according to Pedersen via *š) in the same environment. Since Pedersen’s discovery the changes in question have fascinated linguists of all sorts. Indo-Europeanists and Balto-Slavists have been interested in determining whether this change is a shared innovation of Slavic and Indo-Iranian and whether and to what extent the change also affected Baltic. Phonologists have wondered whether the triggering sounds involved are in some way a natural class in articulatory or acoustics terms or whether we must recognize multiple distinct events or rankings.
What to Call This Thing?
Most Anglophone scholars and not only them, whatever their subfield, refer to this phenomenon as RUKI, i.e. after the four triggering environments r, u, k, and i. When I first started to study Linguistics back in 1986 this was the label I learned and for all I knew this was the only name ever used and might have stretched back all the way to the Neogrammarians. But a little reflection, which I never engaged in, should have made me question those ideas. Neogrammarians typically didn’t name “sound laws” in such a fashion. It’s Osthoff’s Law not V̄RC-shortening. In fact one still sees the occasional reference to RUKI under the name Pedersen’s Law (Russ. Закон Педерсена) after its (second) discoverer, by Stigler’s Law of Eponymy (Christian Uhlenbeck anticipated Pedersen in 1894). So where did this convenient label come from? How old is it? Who coined it and how did it eliminate all competitors?
Pre-RUKI Times or Days of IURK
[AZ note: in this extraordinary survey of terminological usage, material in German and French is not translated, as is customary in the Indo-Europeanist literature; meanwhile, readers interested in the meaty stuff, the innovation and spread of RUKI, can skip ahead to the sections The Ruki Season and The prehistory of RUKI.]
If we examine the literature from 1894 up until 1970, a crucial year as we will see, the order of segments is almost always given as i, u, r, k. Here is a representative sample starting with Uhlenbeck 1894:384:
1) Intervocalisch ging s in ch über, ausgenommen, wenn der erste Vocal ein e oder o war.
2) Nach k und r ging s in ch über, wenn es von einem Vocal gefolgt wurde
Pedersen 1895:74:
Das Ergebnis der vorhergehenden Untersuchung ist in aller Kürze: Nach idg. ī̆ i̯ ū̆ u̯ r r̥ k q wurde s zu ch, wenn nicht ein Explosivlaut folgte.
Leskien 1898:41:
Die vergleichende Grammatik macht es wahrscheinlich, dass ursprünglich das indog. s im Slavischen nur nach den Vertretern der indogerm. Laute i, u, r, r̥, k zu ch wurde.
Meillet 1908:84:
en indo-iranien, *s passe à š, et *z à ž après ī̆, ū̆ , r, (représentant r et l) et k, que la sifflante soit suivie de voyelle ou de consonne ou finale de mot. En slave, *s est représenté par la spirante gutturale sourde x (représentant sans doute un plus ancient š) après i, u, r, k indo-européens (ou plutôt orientaux; car *ks donne s), mais seulement devant voyelle suivante.
Endzelins 1911:29:
нѣкоторые языковѣды относятъ начало этого измѣненія s въ положеніи послѣ i, u, r, k въ эпоху славяно-балтійскаго единства (къ чему склоняется, наприм., Бругманъ въ Kurze vrgl. Gramm. § 297) или даже (въ качествѣ діалектическаго явленія) въ эпоху индоевропейскаго праязыка.
Some linguists attribute the beginning of this change of s to the position after i, u, r, k in the era of Slavic-Baltic unity (to which, for example, Brugmann leans in Kurze vrgl. Gramm. § 297) or even (as a dialectal phenomenon) in the era of the Indo-European proto-language…
van Wijk, Balties-Slaviese Problemen, 1913:14:
Zodra zijn aandacht er op was gevallen, dat een zeer eigenaardig taalverschijnsel van het Indo-iraans, namelik de overgang van s in š na i, u, r, k, frappant overeenkomt met een dergelijk slavies verschijnsel.
As soon as his (Endzelins’) attention was drawn to the fact that a very peculiar linguistic phenomenon of Indo-Iranian, namely the transition from s to š after i, u, r, k, was strikingly similar to such a Slavic phenomenon…
Diels 1932:130:
Wenn einer der geschlosseneren Vokale (slav. i ь, y ъ, u, das aus i-Diphthongen entstandene ě bzw. derer ältere Vorläufer) vorherging, ebenso nach einem r und in der ursprünglichen Verbindung ks.
Meillet 1934:34:
La position de la langue requise pour i, u, r, k explique le changement de s en š. Mais il n’est pas normal qu’une sifflante comme š devienne une spirante comme x, c’est-à-dire une consonne plus fermée, plus proche du type des occlusives.
Nahtigal 1938:10 po i – u – r – k “after i, u, r, k”
Mikkola 1942:174:
dass s nach i– und u-Lauten sowie nach r und velarem k in x vor hinteren und in š vor palatalen Vokalen übergegangen ist.
Entwistle 1944:34:
But it is clear that at least three separate phonetic causes have converged in the i u r k rule.
Note the degree of conventionalization in Entwistle’s “iurk rule”.
Jakobson 1955:4:
PROTOSLAVIC (Primitive Slavic), which substituted (1) s, z for advanced k, g, and (2) x for the old s preceded by i, u, r, k, was a Western offshoot of the satem-group of Indo-European languages.
Bräuer 1961:178:
In einer sehr frühen Periode des Urslavischen ist das idg. s unter gewissen Bedingungen zu ch geworden, und zwar unterliegt es ständig diesem Wandel in der Stellung nach i, u, r oder k, wenn ein Vokal folgt.
Stang 1966:94:
Die Veränderung des s fand im Indoiranischen nach ī̆, ū̆, r, k statt.
Szemerényi 1970:45
Eine Besonderheit der östlichen Sprachen (Arisch, Slavisch, teils auch Baltisch) ist es, dass s nach i, u, r, k zu š wurde, woraus im Aind. weiterhin das zerebrale ṣ entstand, während im Slavischen vor velar Vokalen x ( = d. ch) erscheint.
Even after 1970 the i, u, r, k order continues to appear, e.g. Windfuhr 1972:53:
One of the most famous satəm rules is the ‘iurk’-rule which covers the fact that IE s changes to š after these classes of sounds or, in brief, that the nonhigh sibilant becomes high after high sound.
Aitzetmüller 1978:39: nach den Lauten i, u, r und k”
And as recently as 1995 Alexander Schenker 1995:80 wrote:
s became ś when preceded by i /i̯ u/u̯, r, k and followed by a vowel or a sonant.
There are only a few eccentric exceptions to this. Vondrák 1906:350 reversed the order of u and i : Der Übergang fand statt nach den u– und i-Vokalen ferner nach r und k.
and Arumaa (1976:42) reversed the order of k and r:
Mit anderen Worten, die Palatalreihe k̑(h), ĝ(h) hatte im Slavischen eine längere Zeit die Aussprache eines Lautes, die von derjenigen des normalen s und von s hinter i, u, k, r verschieden war.
Another exception to this ordering is Meillet in his Introduction, who uses the order k, r, i, u (1903:65; 1912:73; 1937:96)
Après k, r, i, u, en indo-iranien, l’articulation de *s se transforme en celle de chuintantes.
This finds a slight but distorted echo in Shevelov 1965:127:
s was preserved in most positions intact, but after k, r, u, i if not followed by a stop, it changed to x (Pedersen’s rule).
and Dressler and Grosu 1973:61 refer to the “die ruki oder kriu-Regel” but despite Meillet’s enormous prestige and the centrality of the Introduction to students of Indo-European this order never caught on.
The RUKI Season
To my knowledge RUKI first appeared in print in an article “Greek-Letter Variables and the Sanskrit ruki Class” by our blog host Arnold Zwicky in Linguistic Inquiry from 1970:
According to a well known rule of Sanskrit internal sandhi, s is replaced by its retroflex counterpart, ṣ, when immediately preceded by r, u, k, or i (or one of their alternants, such as o or e or the syllabic liquid r̥).
After 1970 the dam breaks and RUKI becomes quite quickly the standard term in Slavic, Indo-Europeanist, and phonologist circles. It’s in the title of a W.S. Allen paper from 1973 “Khthṓn, ruki and related matters” in the title of a paper by Vennemann from 1974 “Sanskrit ruki and the concept of a natural class”, an article by James Dishington on Old Iranian Sibilants, and a paper by Hans Hock on the Indo-Iranian accusative plural of consonant stems. By 1977 Regier’s textbook of Old Church Slavonic textbook refers to the Slavic phenomenon as (p. xxv) “the historical change known affectionately as the “Ruki” rule.” suggesting a high degree of familiarity.
It’s clear the Zwicky’s article was the crucial turning point in the success of RUKI. This may be partly attributable to the prominence of Linguistic Inquiry, the organ of MIT Linguistics, which was in 1970 at a highpoint of its prestige and influence. But Zwicky in person was also a spreader of the term. Jared Klein reports in an email of April 16, 2024 “I first heard the term “RUKI” at the Linguistics Institute at Ohio State in the summer of 1970 [where Zwicky was a faculty member (M.W.)]. Its takeoff was immediate after Zwicky used the term in LI.” Hans Hock in an email of the same date writes “As far as I can recollect, I first came across RUKI when I joined Illinois, with Arnold Zwicky as my colleague.” This datum is important because Zwicky was on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign (UIUC) from 1965 to 1969. Hock joined the faculty at Illinois in 1967 so we can date the transfer of the term to the academic year 1967–1969. Zwicky writes in an email of April 15, 2024, that he wrote the RUKI squib in 1968-69 while at UIUC. Zwicky himself had discussed the phenomenon in two earlier publications, 1964 and 1965, and in these he still uses the traditional order i, u, r, k. Zwicky’s written usage changed somewhere in the 1965-1968 period.
Zwicky himself doesn’t have any precise recollection of where he got the term but in an email of April 15, 2024, Zwicky suggested:
It’s possible that I picked up the “ruki” label from Morris Halle (who was my dissertation adviser) or Cal Watkins (who was on my dissertation committee), but that was in 1965, and we don’t seem to have any textual evidence of the label from that period.
But as it will turn out we do have textual evidence from even before 1965.
The prehistory of RUKI
Zwicky’s pointers to Morris Halle of MIT and Calvert Watkins of Harvard were both plausible. Both scholars were speakers of Russian, where ruki is the gen. sg. (rukí) and nom. pl. (rúki) of ruka ‘hand’. [fn 1] Both were students of Roman Jakobson [AZ: as was I]. Watkins, I know from personal experience, was a lover of word-play and linguistic humor. Following up this lead I wrote to some other scholars active in Cambridge-based linguistics in the 1960s, E. Wayles Browne, Paul Kiparsky and Henning Andersen, all of whom were kind enough to share their recollections. Browne tells me (email April 14, 2024)
I was a fellow student of Zwicky’s in Cambridge in the 1960s, and I’m fairly certain I heard ‘the ruki rule’ being spoken of in Slavic linguistics classes — as something familiar, not as a neologism.
Paul Kiparsky (April 17, 2024) wrote:
I believe the term originated some time after 1965 in oral discussions between Morris and me about how to characterize the ruki environment in terms of distinctive features. It was around then that he was revising the Jakobsonian features, and [high] was one of the new ones, which fit at least i, u, k. (We worried about r, and I remember being puzzled why r in Swedish has a retroflexing effect on a following coronal even though it is not itself retroflex). I may have started using “ruki” first, but in any case I don’t remember either of us giving it much thought, it just rolls more trippingly off the tongue than i, u, r, k.
Both of these emails confirm that RUKI was in use in Cambridge in the 1960s and Browne’s email pins the term to Slavist circles. This general recollection is confirmed by an email from Jay Jasanoff (April 13, 2024) who writes:
I guess it’s true that the name “ruki” wasn’t applied to the rule when I learned it in the 60’s. When I did first encounter the term I assumed (wrongly, it seems [not completely M.W.]) that it had been in use among Slavicists from time immemorial.
Kiparsky’s recollection that it originated in conversations between himself and Morris Halle, is as we will see, not quite correct, but it is another pointer in the direction of Morris Halle and the broader Jakobsonian circle.
But it was Henning Andersen who found proof of the use of RUKI in oral usage before 1970. Andersen, a Harvard Ph.D. (1962-1966) whose thesis was directed by Roman Jakobson, wrote an important article on the phenomenon in Slavic published in 1968 where he sticks to the traditional i, u, r, k order but in an email of April 15, 2024, he writes:
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this [i.e. RUKI (M.W.)] was the usual handle for Pedersen’s Law when I was a graduate student (1962–1966). I can look in my course notes (Intro to B(alto-)S(lavic), spring 1967) when I have a moment. I would naturally have avoided this colloquialism in a formal text such as my 1968 paper.
And in fact Andersen did get back to me (April 17, 2024) with his lecture notes from the Spring 1967 class at Harvard (Ling 256) that Andersen taught. He writes:
Several mentions, in different contexts, of “*s after i, u, r, k”, but in the discussion of the change it is called the “ruki change”, numerous times. Then as now I would distinguish between rules (synchronic) and changes (diachronic). So this usage seems correct by my standards. In a contrastive display I write “ruki V” and “ruki C”, presumably I put this on the blackboard, or perhaps I had a handout. Don’t remember. The article has a different display. Here are the concluding remarks on the change in my notes:
In other words, the only essential difference between Baltic and Slavic with respect to the ruki change is in the different re-evaluation of the ruki-allophone in the two groups. Since this difference is indissolubly tied in with the satem-assibilation, it’s evidently an early difference. I think it is evidence of a lack of linguistic solidarity among pre-Balts and pre-Slavs at a very early time. Of course this does not mean that pre-Balts and pre-Slavs couldn’t continue to meet socially. Some of the best friends of the Slavs, indeed, may have been Balts.
So here we have positive proof that RUKI was used orally in Cambridge in Slavic linguistics in 1967. But Andersen was also able to find his notes from a class taught by Horace Lunt in the fall of 1963 (Slavic 252). He may have missed the lecture on Slavic x because there are no notes on the topic, but at the top of a page on Morphology there is a marginal note which reads “Skr. s > š analogous to RUKI rule.” [The note on this page reproduced here:]
Thus Horace Lunt must have used this term in his 1963 lecture. Though reference to RUKI is absent in all editions of his Old Church Slavonic Grammar before 2001 — all prior editions were strictly synchronic. But Lunt does mention RUKI in his 1981 book The Progressive Palatalization in Slavic (p. 43): “Two changes are to be assigned to the period when IE dialects became more specifically Pre-Slavic and Pre-Baltic: the shift of s after i u r k (known to Jakobson’s students as the ruki-rule) and the assibilation and de-affrication of *ḱ and *ǵ.”[fn 2] The phrasing strongly suggests that Jakobson was the originator of the term and indeed both Horace Lunt and Morris Halle were students of Jakobson. The term never appears in Jakobson’s published writings, as far as I can tell, but it must have been a feature of his lectures, and this makes sense given his native language and his interest in verbal art.
To sum up the label was most likely devised by Roman Jakobson and found its first extension among his direct students especially on the Slavic side (Lunt, Andersen) but another student (Morris Halle) was probably responsible for spreading the term outside of the Slavic world to generative phonology and a student of [Jakobson’s and] Halle’s (Arnold Zwicky) extended the term to the parallel Sanskrit phenomenon. After the LI article, RUKI jumped containment and eventually cleared the field of alternative formulation. But there were resisters. Stephanie Jamison in an email of April 16th, 2024, writes:
I do remember that Stanley [Insler, the Yale Sanskritist and Indo-Europeanist (M.W.)] hated the term [i.e. RUKI (M.W.)] and insisted on iurk. I think (and in fact am pretty sure) he already produced his anti-ruki screed in our 1st yr. Skt. class (1970), but I can’t swear to it – it might have been a few (but not many) years later – certainly in my first years in grad school.
I suspect Stanley Insler, not a fan of Jakobsonian or generative grammar, resented the spread of RUKI at the expense of iurk, a long established and more linguistic-based order (vowels + sonorant consonant + obstruent). But phonotactics,[fn 3] a Russian- language pun, a social network (Jakobson’s students), and institutional prestige (MIT and Linguistic Inquiry) carried the day.
Footnotes
Thanks to Henning Andersen, E. Wayles Browne, Daniel Bunčić, Hans H. Hock, Stephanie Jamison, Jay Jasanoff, Paul Kiparsky, Jared Klein, Guus Kroonen, Cynthia Vakareliyska, Rémy Viredaz, Olga Yokoyama, Mikhail Zhivlov, and Arnold Zwicky.
1. Mikhail Zhivlov tells me that “in Russian usage it is always правило руки́ rather than правило ру́ки.”
2. I thank Florian Wandl for this reference who communicated it to E. Wayles Browne who told me.
3. Guus Kroonen informs me by tweet that iurk is still used in The Netherlands and pronounced as /jœrk/, i.e. as a homophone of jurk ‘dress’.
References
Aitzetmüller, Rudolf. 1991. Altbulgarische Grammatik als Einführung in die slavische Sprachwissenschaft.
Allen, W. Sidney. 1973. Khthṓn, ruki and related matters. Transactions of the Philological Society 72:98–126.
Andersen, Henning. 1968. IE *s after i, u, r, k in Baltic and Slavic. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 11:171–90.
Arumaa, Peeter. 1976. Urslavische Grammatik. Vol. 2.
Bräuer, Herbert. 1961. Slavische Sprachwissenschaft.
Diels, Paul. 1932. Altkirchenslavische Grammatik: Mit einer Auswahl von Texten und einem Wörterbuch. Heidelberg.
Dishington, James. 1974. Old Iranian sibilants: a synchronic analysis. Journal of the American Oriental Society 460–67.
Dressler, Wolfgang and Alexander Grosu. 1973. Generative Phonologie und indogermansiche Lautgeschichte. Indogermanische Forschungen 77:19–72.
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Schenker, Alexander. 1995. The Dawn of Slavic.
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Uhlenbeck, Christian C. 1894. Die Behandlung des indg. s im Slavischen. Archiv für Slavische Philologie 16:368–84.
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Wijk, Nicolaas van. 1913. Balties-Slaviese Problemen.
Windfuhr, Gernot L. 1972. Some Avestan rules and their signs. Journal of the American Oriental Society 92:52–9.
Zwicky, Arnold. M. 1964. Three traditional rules of Sanskrit. Quarterly Progress Report, Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, No. 74, 203–4.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1965. Topics in Sanskrit Phonology. Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1970. Greek-letter variables and the Sanskrit ruki class. Linguistic Inquiry 1(4). 549–55.
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