The authors of the Prâtis"âkhyas already noticed that the received text of the R.gveda scans very badly unless many instances of the glides y and v are treated as syllabic. Thus in RV 2.6.7, the line dûtó jányeva mítryah. has only seven syllables even though the verse is written in the eight-syllable gâyatrî metre. This can be rectified if one reads the last word, mítryah. `befriended', as mítriah.. Sievers's Law (Collinge 1985:159-174, Seebold 1972) gives one condition for this alternation: the vocalic reading is more likely if the preceding syllable is heavy. This includes the case where that syllable has a short vowel followed by two consonants, such as tr in this example. Again, this suggests that the first of two consonants closes a syllable, as predicted by CS (Hermann 1923:257-260).