theory might seem to "behave" in accord with it is explained below. Lindeman In 1965, Fredrik Otto Lindeman (1936–) published an article proposing a significant modification of Edgerton's theory. Disregarding Edgerton's evidence (on the grounds that he was not prepared to judge the niceties of Rigvedic scansion) he took instead as the data to be analyzed the scansions in Hermann Grassmann's Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda . From these he concluded that Edgerton had been right, but only up to a point: the alternations he postulated did indeed apply to all sonorants; but in word-initial position, the alternation was limited to forms like "sky", as cited above – that is, words where the "short" form was monosyllabic. Newer developments Edgerton's claims, once very generally hailed, have not fared well. Regarding the skewed distributions in the Rigveda, Edgerton neglected to test his observations against controls, namely forms not susceptible to his theory but sharing other properties with the "test" forms such as part of speech, metrical configuration, and so on. The first scholar to look at controls was Franklin Eugene Horowitz (, but whose work actually dates from ten years earlier). Horowitz noted that for example all 65 occurrences of Vedic suvīra- "well-heroed" do occur in line-initial position or follow a heavy syllable (as if in accord with Edgerton's converse), but exactly the same thing is true of e.g. supatrá- "having beautiful wings" (which can have nothing to do with Edgerton's law). And indeed such skewing in distribution is pervasive in Vedic vocabulary: śatam "100", and dozens of other forms with no bearing on Edgerton's law, have exactly the same strong preference for not following a word ending with a short vowel that e.g. śiras "head" does, presumably by reason of beginning with a single consonant followed by a light syllable. A second difficulty has emerged much more recently : The actual passages from the Rigveda cited in Edgerton's two large articles in 1934 and 1943 as examples of the effects of his theory in action seriously misrepresent the facts in all but a handful of cases. No more than three Rigvedic passages cited in the 1934 article, and none at all in 1943, actually support the claims of Edgerton's law regarding word-initial sequences. This lies well within the operation of pure chance. And it has been shown also that the apparent success of Lindeman's more modest claims are not without troubling problems,