PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)

[DFOKeefe at aol.com]

Good Morning I-E-ists,
          I was under the impression that I.E. Roots are pretty much
time-invariant, They can't be created, change, or get lost.  Words derived
from I.E. roots frequently do change, as do languages.  As a matter fact,
entire languages and language families shift in organized manner particular
to each.  But I.E. roots do not. Thus, I.E. roots don't decay, degenerate, or
go out of existence.  In the time span of recorded human history, entropy
does seem to not apply to I.E. roots.  Maybe to words, though.

Best regards,
David O'Keefe
Houston, Texas

[ Moderator's response:
  Your impression is mistaken.  In the reconstructed morphology of PIE, we see
  a theoretical construct which we call the root; this is the morpheme which
  carries the base meaning assigned to the word(s) in which it is found.  It is
  no more time-invariant that the reconstructed stem formants or endings in the
  same words.

  A root can only survive in the history of a language as long as a word which
  contains it.  There is no reflex in modern English, for example, of the root
  *yebh- "fuck", although it is still alive and well in modern Russian (to the
  extent that the name of one IBM mainframe utility is a great joke).  There
  very likely were roots in IE of which we have no knowledge at all because
  they have not survived into *any* extant language in a manner which allows us
  to assume their existence.

  --rma ]