accusative and ergative languages

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

proto-language at email.msn.com writes:

> I also am certain that if we had reason to know that Albanian and English
>were descendants of a common language, we would eventually discover a kind
>of IE that would be inaccurate in some ways but essentially write.

-- no we wouldn't.  Sigh.

As time goes on, any given language gives us less and less information about
previous forms.  Information is _lost_.

Eg., no amount of analysis of Germanic will give you a PIE word for "bear"
because that word dropped out of that family.  All you'll get is variations
on "the brown one".