PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)

[Adam Hyllested]

On Fri, 16 Jul 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

> 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.

X
But if we only knew the modern IE languages, we would still be able to
reconstruct words like:

*p at ter 'father'

(on the basis of, say, English <father>, Italian <padre>, and Hindi
<pita>)

*newos 'new'

(on the basis of, say, Modern Greek <neos>, Portuguese <novo>, and Polish
<nowy>)

The same is true for morphological paradigms etc.

Adam Hyllested