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.