PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

>> 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>)

I doubt that we could *reconstruct* anything on the basis of these isolated
examples, but we could of course suspect that something with these
languages seems to be different than with, say, Burushaski and Quechua. At
least one thing is sure: we'd had a great deal of discussion about chance
resemblances and stuff at our hands as we have now. We would have a hard
time to tell the hows and whys of pairs like /father/: /padre/ but also e.
/paternal/ aso. aso.

>The same is true for morphological paradigms etc.

Well, I would love to see morphological paradigms reconstructable on the
basis of English, Italian and Hindi ...

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32