4. _Position of the Italic Group._--The Italic group, then, when compared with the other seven main "families" of Indo-European speech, in respect of their most significant differences, ranges itself thus:
(i.) _Back-palatal and Velar Sounds._--In point of its treatment of the Indo-European back-palatal and velar sounds, it belongs to the western or _centum_ group, the name of which is, of course, taken from Latin; that is to say, like German, Celtic and Greek, it did not sibilate original _k_ and _g_, which in Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Slavonic and Albanian have been converted into various types of sibilants (Ind.-Eur.* _kmtom_ = Lat. _centum_, Gr. _[Greek: (he)-katon]_, Welsh _cant_, Eng. _hund_-(_red_), but Sans. _satam_, Zend _sat[schwa]m_); but, on the other hand, in company with just the same three western groups, and in contrast to the eastern, the Italic languages labialized the original velars (Ind.-Eur. * _qod_ = Lat. _quod_, Osc. _pod_, Gr. _[Greek: pod-(apos)]_, Welsh _pwy_, Eng. _what_, but Sans. _kás_, "who?").
(ii.) _Indo-European Aspirates._--Like Greek and Sanskrit, but in contrast to all the other groups (even to Zend and Armenian), the Italic group largely preserves a distinction between the Indo-European _mediae aspiratae_ and _mediae_ (e.g. between Ind.-Eur. _dh_ and _d_, the former when initial becoming initially regularly Lat. _f_ as in Lat. _fec-i_ [cf. Umb. _feia_, "_faciat_"], beside Gr. [Greek: he-thêk-a] [cf. Sans. _da-dha-ti_, "he places"], the latter simply _d_ as in _domus_, Gr. [Greek: domos]). But the _aspiratae_, even where thus distinctly treated in Italic, became fricatives, not pure aspirates, a character which they only retained in Greek and Sanskrit.
(iii.) _Indo-European o._--With Greek and Celtic, Latin preserved the Indo-European _o_, which in the more northerly groups (Germanic, Balto-Slavonic), and also in Indo-Iranian, and, curiously, in Messapian, was confused with _a_. The name for olive-oil, which spread with the use of this commodity from Greek ([Greek: elaiwon]) to Italic speakers and thence to the north, becoming by regular changes (see below) in Latin first *_ólaivom_, then *_óleivom_, and then taken into Gothic and becoming _alev_, leaving its parent form to change further (not later than 100 B.C.) in Latin to _oleum_, is a particularly important example, because (a) of the chronological limits which are implied, however roughly, in the process just described, and (b) of the close association in time of the change of _o_ to _a_ with the earlier stages of the "sound-shifting" (of the Indo-European plosives and aspirates) in German; see Kretschmer, _Einleit_. p. 116, and the authorities he cites.