ABSTRACT
The phonaesthetic aptness in this territory of the labial semivowel with its frictionless lip-rounding might give proponents of the gesture theory of language a field-day; not that that is the intention of this essay. As Jespersen pointed out long ago, whenever phonaesthetic factors favour one of a pair of competing synonyms, or conflicting homophones, the word so favoured is likely to be preferred and retained over a period of time, so that we may expect lexemes of this kind to maintain their frequency in the vocabulary of a language, without postulating any disturbance in the laws of sound-change. It is not surprising, then, that naIve inspection of the words cited in the last paragraph will suggest that certain of them are historically connected: for instance, Mon wia'() , compound', Sre waang, Palaung va?).
