too, such as the limitation of the reliable examples to semivowels (the glides and ) even though such alternations in the other four consonants should have left robust outcomes (for example, a disyllabic form of prá "forth, away" should have been very much more frequent than the monosyllable, which would have occurred only after a word ending in a short vowel; but there is no evidence for such a disyllabic form as **pirá, in Vedic or any other form of Indic); and that the syllabified alternants (e.g. ) are very much rarer than they should be: they account for only fifteen to twenty percent of the total: they should account for at least eighty percent, since the monosyllabic form would have originally occurred, like prá, only after a word ending in a short vowel. Further, only the alternants have a "distribution": the shapes show no sensitivity to phonetic environment at all. (And even that disyllabic "distribution" can be inexplicable: disyllabic dyāus in the Rigveda always and only, with one exception, occurs in line-initial position, i.e., in only one of the four environments calling for syllabification of the resonant. Nothing in Lindeman's theory accounts for this striking distribution.) Sievers's law in Germanic Within the context of Indo-European, Sievers's law is generally held to be one-way. That is, it applied only to create syllabic resonants from nonsyllabics after heavy syllables, but not the other way around after light syllables. In Proto-Germanic, however, the law came to be applied in both directions, with PIE syllabic becoming nonsyllabic after light syllables. As a consequence, suffixal -j- and -ij- came to be in complementary distribution in Proto-Germanic, and were perceived as allophonic variants of the same suffix with the former following light syllables and the latter, heavy. Following the loss of j intervocalically, -ī- (from earlier -iji-) was also complementary to -i- in inflected forms. The alternation is preserved in many of the older languages. In addition to the Gothic nouns cited above, Gothic strong adjectives show a light suffix -ji- following a light stem, yielding the nominative singular masculine midjis "middle", while a heavy suffix -ī- (from -iji-/-ija-) follows a long stem: wilþeis /wilþīs/ "wild". In Old Norse, nonsyllabic -j- is preserved word-medially, but syllabic -ij- is lost like all other medial-syllable vowels. This is seen in class 1 weak verbs, which end in -ja (from Germanic *-janą) following a short stem, but in