accusative and ergative languages

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Wed, 7 Jul 1999, petegray wrote:

> [...]
> Proto-proto- languages simply cannot be recovered with the same degree of
> certainty as languages nearer to our attested texts.

At the risk of shocking some and destroying what little reputation I may
have, I'd say: That depends on where the lines meet.

Thus, on the basis of a handful of Modern Indo-European languages taken
from different branches you can hope to get little glimpses of the
language of the youngest period common to all of them, i.e. the IE
protolanguage. You cannot get Russian + English + Persian + Greek +
Italian + Albanian + Irish to tell you what 'name' was in Old Russian, or
in Proto-Balto-Slavic; your only result, if any, would apply to
Proto-Indo-European.

Therefore, in many respects we are better informed about very old periods
than about the intervening stages closer to the attested languages. But do
go easy with this truth: it is immediately misused to discredit our most
objective scholarship if told to the wrong people.

Jens