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On the development of soft labials...85lieve to be just one segment /p ® b ® f ® v ® m ® /, appear in the guise ofa consonant cluster, i.e. C+[X ® V ® ] or C+[‚ ó], and the bilabial nasal is followedby [­]. In other words, the ‘palatal appendix’ [j] is strengthened inthese dialects either to prepalatal fricatives [‚/ó] or palatal fricatives [X ® /V ® ],and it can also evolve into the prepalatal nasal [­]. It will be demonstratedthat this phenomenon can be explained easily if the initial emptyCV unit is ascribed an inert character. The findings of this section willthen be compared with the evolution of /Cj/ clusters in Gallo-Romance(Scheer and Ségéral 2001). The evolution of such clusters as theresult of the consonantification of Latin short i/e in hiatus, confirms theassumption that languages belong to two groups, i.e. those with an activeand those with an inactive initial empty CV unit. Let us begin bypresenting some basic facts concerning the so-called soft labials and theMazovian data.4.2. Soft labials4.2.1. Phonological status of soft labialsThis section includes a brief survey of the possible realisations of the softlabials /p ® b ® f ® v ® m ® / both in Standard Polish and in the Mazovian dialects.We shall also present some arguments for and against the one-/two-segmentanalysis. The discussion in this section draws on some earlier researchand findings (Friedrich 1955, Furdal 1955, Zduñska1965, Dejna 1973, Czaplicki 1998).According to the authors mentioned above, soft labials can be realisedin four or even five different ways: as the palatalised labial segment[p ® b ® f ® v ® m ® ], palatalised labial segment plus the appendix front glide [j],or as the hard labial plus the glide. The remaining two realisations arecharacteristic of the Mazovian dialects. To anticipate the discussion concerningthe development of soft labials in those dialects in the immediatelyfollowing section, we can briefly note that in Mazovian dialects theappendix glide can be realised as [‚/ó] or [X ® /V ® ] and [­].Klemensiewicz et al. (1964) classifies the realisations of soft labialsinto two general groups: synchronic [p ® b ® f ® v ® m ® ] and asynchronic[p ® j b ® j f ® j v ® j m ® j]. While the synchronic variant was a standard pronuncia-