It has been argued that Sievers's law is actually an innovation of Germanic. The reasons for this are two distinct innovations pertaining to Sievers's law outcomes. The first is that the law works in both directions, not only yielding *"-iya-" following long stems, but instigating the reverse, decrementing etymological *"-iya-" to *"-ya-" following short stems. The second is an enlarged environment for the transformation. In Germanic, the syllabic shape is found not only after heavy syllables, as in Vedic, but also after some polysyllabic stems. This is quite unlike anything in Indic.