NATLANG: A Romanian Sound Change

There is an interesting change that occurs in rural Moldovan dialects
of Romanian whereby labials become palatalized velars before the vowel
/i/. I have verified that this change occurs before all labial
obstruents:

Standard 	Dialect 	Orthography
[co'pi][co'k_ji] 	copii (children)
['bi.ne] 	['g_ji.ni 	bine (well)
[fi] 	[Si] 	fii (sons)
[vin] 	[Zin] 	vin (wine)

I'm not sure exactly what the environment for this change is, and I
don't have the data to figure it out. What I do remember is hearing in
my Linguistics class that this sort of change shouldn't be possible.
It has to do with feature geometry–the [labial] feature is a lip
gesture, which the tongue position can't affect. Obviously this isn't
the case, because this sound change *does* take place, but I'm
wondering if any one knows of any similar examples or can shed light
on this particular change.
(Note: Cross-posted to my blog at http://jaspax.com)

--
JS Bangs
jaspax@gmail.com
http://jaspax.com

"I could buy you a drink
I could tell you all about it
I could tell you why I doubted
And why I still believe."
 - Pedro the Lion