accusative and ergative languages

[petegray]

Pat said:
> The
> idea that vocabulary is irretrievably lost is jejeune.

The idea that it is not lost is equally jejune (if I may use the English
spelling - I mean no offence).   One of the problems in PIE is identifying
which isolates are PIE and which are not,  or, where there are similar words
in two languages, which are inherited cognates, and which are loans (yes, I
know there are techniques for this - but there are still big problems).

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

Peter