PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/12/99 9:28:59 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
proto-language at email.msn.com writes:

>I simply do not understand why some find it difficult to understand that
>reconstructing the Proto-Language is only primarily different from
>reconstructing Indo-European in the wider selection of source languages for
>data.

-- Temporal distance.  Loss of information.  Entropy.

A distinction between 5,000 years of unrecoverable loss and 50,000 years of
unrecoverable loss.

Words _vanish_.  A certain percentage of vocabulary just ceases to exist in
every century.