PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>ECOLING at aol.com writes:

>Of course it is going to get RELATIVELY more difficult to reconstruct to
>greater time depths.

-- true.  And 50,000 years is a whole different ball game compared to 5000
years.

ALL of that extra time-distance is pre-literate, which means no records of
what was going on.  Our picture of PIE would be very different, and much less
detailed, if we had no written records of extinct languages.

Hell, the original insight that the IE languages were derived from a common
ancestor was made by comparting Sanskrit with Classical Greek and Latin --
all extinct languages!

The link between Sanskrit and Latin or Classical Greek is so close that any
layman can see it; whole phrases are nearly identical.

This is, to put it mildly, not the case between, say, English and Bengali.

>If there are sound-symbolic ideal forms for lexemes having certain meanings

-- with minor exceptions (such as "kuku"), words _are_ arbitrary sound
assemblages.