accusative and ergative languages

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>proto-language at email.msn.com writes:

>So what? It only requires us to expand our universe of applicable data. The
>idea that vocabulary is irretrievably lost is jejeune.

-- actually, it's obvious.  Information vanishes as entropy increases.  If we
didn't have written or other artificially preserved examples of now-extinct
languages, much of the PIE vocabulary we have would be completely
unrecoverable.

Try reconstructing PIE using _nothing_ but contemporary Albanian and English.
You'd be hard-put to prove that such a language even existed.