Excluding data

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Fri, 24 Sep 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

[...]
> Take any decent dictionary of English published around 1900.  How many
> of the words entered in it existed in Old English, only about 1000 years
> ago?  Not many.  Why should Basque be different?  (And the Pre-Basque
> I'm interested in dates back to about 2000 years ago.)
[...]

But take any dictionary of Icelandic and ask how many of its words existed
in Old Norse. The answer is, practically all! And it is probably a fair
statement that, adding proper sound changes, you may even push that back
to Proto-Germanic. I guess English and Icelandic are both relatively
extreme cases. Where Basque stands between the two poles must be looked
into with an open mind, as I suppose you have already done.

Jens