Similarities to Latvian and Lithuanian

[Mithridates]

I'm curious whether there is any data available on IME vocabulary compared to English, Latvian and Lithuanian, that is, how much more similar IME is to those two than English is. If this data is available I'm curious what the Latvian and Lithuanian governments would make of it. Finland for example has been actively involved in promotion of Latin so it seems that it's not beyond a government to support language revival projects.

I tried a bit of this myself using the example phrases on the site but I'd prefer something more along the lines of a Swadesh list (individual vocab as opposed to phrases).

Thanks.

[indoeuropean]

Qeime Mithridates:

I'm curious whether there is any data available on IME vocabulary compared to English, Latvian and Lithuanian, that is, how much more similar IME is to those two than English is.

There are Swadesh lists comparing English with Latvian (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix: ... adesh_list) and with Lithuanian (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix: ... adesh_list). I cannot find any Proto-Indo-European one, but there are lots of vocabulary comparisons out there, including our grammar and Oxford's Proto-Indo-European manual. None of them, I guess, is exactly what you are looking for. We prepared e.g. a tiny leaflet for the Forom des Langues de Toulouse, although - because of space requirements - we left a "Balto-Slavic" column, instead of separated Baltic and Slavic columns:

Indo-European proto-languages - word comparison

indoeuropean.jpg (58.87 KiB) Viewed 754 times

If this data is available I'm curious what the Latvian and Lithuanian governments would make of it. Finland for example has been actively involved in promotion of Latin so it seems that it's not beyond a government to support language revival projects.

I don't know about the Lithuanian or Latvian government objectives, but Finland used Latin to translate official news about the EU - as far as I know - just to end the discussions with the German government, because, while Finland held the EU Presidency, official documents were only translated into English and French... It was, according to Finnish officials, just "a weekly roundup of news in classical Latin", which "attracted much curiosity", but wasn't in any case a language policy Finland would like to follow; it was something more like "I'll translate EU documents to the language I want, you #$^%@* Germans! ". What reveals, in fact, how 'good' and 'generally accepted' the current linguistic policy actually is for the member states...

I contacted personally the EU language commissioner years ago (Jan Figel, I think), when we won the University prize for the project (2006 then), and he replied saying that the EU was "not looking for a common language, however good one might think it is. The current objective of the EU is to support multilingualism". So, if we want the European Union to support one common official language, then we'll have to make such proposals, as you say, to the individual EU member states, because commissioners aren't there to make their own policies or to change anything at all, but to make an administrative work following the policies of the member states. That was another reason to create an Association, instead of keeping our language revival work in private groups.

Anyway, I think I'll prepare a complete Swadesh list in the future (or request that it be made), with Proto-Indo-European and other European languages, to show it to different EU Presidency holders. I don't think I'll wait until 2013 to contact the Lithuanian government, though... (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency ... 07_onwards) .

And, by the way, I looked for the etymology of the name "Mithridates" and its Indo-European translation: http://dnghu.org/Indo-European-Languages/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=201