Osthoff's law

Osthoff's law is a sound change in which a long vowel shortens before a resonant consonant followed by another consonant. It is attested especially in Greek and other Indo-European languages.

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Resonant consonant: A consonant capable of functioning as a syllable nucleus, such as a nasal, liquid, or glide. The law targets long vowels before resonants when another consonant follows.
Ancient Greek: The language of ancient Greek literature, inscriptions, and scholarship, with several historical dialects. Osthoff's law is especially associated with Greek sound history.
Hermann Osthoff: A German linguist of the nineteenth century who studied Indo-European languages and sound change. The law is named after the scholar associated with its formulation.
Grassmann's law: A dissimilation rule in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit that removes aspiration from one of two aspirated stops in a word. Unlike Osthoff's law, it concerns aspiration and dissimilation rather than vowel duration.
Phonology: The study of how languages organize and use speech sounds as systems. The law describes a patterned relationship between sound segments.
Consonant cluster: A sequence of two or more consonants without an intervening vowel. A following consonant completes the environment that triggers shortening.
Proto-Indo-European: The reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Comparisons with inherited forms help identify long vowels shortened in daughter languages.
Neogrammarians: A group of nineteenth-century historical linguists who argued that sound laws operate regularly. The law was formulated within the Neogrammarian approach to regular sound change.
Bartholomae's law: A sound change in Indo-Iranian involving the voicing and aspiration of consonant clusters. It targets consonant features, not long vowels before resonants.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change and how they are related over time. Osthoff's law is used to explain historical changes in vowel quantity.