Re: Italo-Celtic dialect base words?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" wrote:

> I never understood Miguel's view that labiolabials are inherently unstable, when one of his own native languages contains such words as _puedo_, _bueno_, _muelo_, etc. More importantly, I was never able to fathom the criteria for developing *p out of *pW in his theory.

He didn't present these as examples when the concept of labialised labials was challenged. He presented *pW as a _labialised_ consonant, rather than as a cluster. Note that he also contrasted PIE *sW with initial /sw/.

As to the loss of labialisation, there seems to be good precedent in Irish, where the contrast palatalised ~ plain ~ labialised reduced to palatalised ~ plain.

Richard.