Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 22:44:14 -0600, "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

>        I don't know about Tocharian (the only source available to me here
>speaks of a two-way contrast), but for Old Irish the idea that there was a
>three-way contrast has certainly been disputed, notably by Green.  Green
>notes that such a system is not attested (as far as I know this is true)
>among living languages

Campbell's "Compendium of the World's Languages" (a far from perfect
book, but it's what I have here at hand), gives palatalized *and*
labialized consonants for the very first language decribed in it:
Abkhazian.  Labialization together with palatalization occurs in
North-West-Caucasian in general, together with a very poor vowel
inventory (/@/ vs. /a/).  Here too, *i and *u yielded *y@ and *w@,
while *a > *@ (and presumably *i: > *ya, *u: > *wa, *a: > *a).
Something similar is assumed for Proto-(North-)Afro-Asiatic.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl