happened to follow a word ending with a short vowel. Everywhere else it would have had two syllables, . Edgerton also maintained that the phonotactic rules in question applied to sequences arising across morpheme boundaries, such as when the bahuvrīhi prefix occurred before a noun beginning with (e.g. "well-heroed", Vedic suvīra-). According to Edgerton, the word should have had two forms, depending on what immediately preceded it: and . This corollary he called the "converse" to Sievers's law, and is usually referred to as Edgerton's converse for short. The evidence for alternation presented by Edgerton was of two sorts. He cited several hundred passages from the Rigveda, which he claimed should be rescanned to reveal hitherto unnoticed expressions of the syllable structure called for by his theory. But most forms show no such direct expressions; for them, Edgerton noted sharply skewed distributions that he interpreted as evidence for a lost alternation between syllabic and nonsyllabic consonants (commonly called "semivowels" in the literature). Thus say śiras "head" (from ) has no monosyllabic partner **śras (from ), but Edgerton noted that śiras occurred 100% of the time in the environments where his theory called for the syllabification of the . Appealing to the "formulaic" nature of oral poetry, especially in tricky and demanding literary forms like sacred Vedic versification, he reasoned that this was direct evidence for the previous existence of an alternant , on the assumption that when (for whatever reason) this *śras and other forms like it came to be shunned, the typical collocations in which they would have (correctly) occurred inevitably became obsolete at the same time as the loss of the form itself. And he was able to present a sizeable body of evidence in the form of these skewed distributions in both the 1934 and 1943 articles. Edgerton's claims were immediately hailed by many in the scholarly community and enjoyed the status of orthodoxy among Indo-Europeanists for 35 or 40 years; in recent times they have not fared so well. Parenthetically, many of Edgerton's data on this point are inappropriate: current scholarship takes śiras, for example, to be the regular reflex of PIE , the syllabicity of the resonant resulting from the fact that it was followed by a consonant in Proto-Indo-European; there never was, nor could have been, a form to yield Indic **śras. How it might be that a form that is irrelevant to Edgerton's