PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>adahyl at cphling.dk writes:

>But if we only knew the modern IE languages, we would still be able to
>reconstruct words like:

-- if it had ever occurred to anyone that the languages were related.  Note
that the whole concept is only about 200 years old, and that comparative
linguistics only really got started in the 19th century.

In any case, the number of reconstructions possible with only extant
languages would be very much smaller.

Linguistic information is lost over time. The more time, the more lost.