Indo-European language revival

These are the latest developments at Dnghu:

• Our main work, A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition, has been sold as printed book through Amazon 45 times since the 16th of October (plus one copy of the earlier 4.1 version), what makes it quite a successful start, compared to the first edition of the grammar. We expect the number of books sold to decrease probably to 20 each month, given that some of the books initially sold correspond to updates of those who owned the first edition. The number is not related to the (much higher) number of readers (or downloaders), but is a good indicator of real interest in the grammar.
• Three books will be sent to members who bough the first edition of the grammar, thanks to the money earned during the last 30 days with the second edition. Another copy will be sent to an editor for its promotion among bookshops.
• The new bank account of the Dnghu Association has been created at the BBVA. We hope to get less problems with PayPal thanks to that change.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

The Indo-European translator-dictionary has been updated with the latest version of the Proto-Indo-European lexicon, by Fernando López-Menchero.

The software of the translator-dictionary has also been upgraded with the latest version of the Open Translation Engine, thanks to the help of David, the main developer of this open source software.

The database and SQL file with the lexicon has been prepared by Marà­a Teresa Batalla, and will be left for download in our web and in external sites for those willing to use the OTE package.

Also, the book A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition, has been revised into version 4.15: The English into Indo-European dictionary section was remade, and other minor corrections added. The new version is already for sale at Amazon and CreateSpace.

Your Indo-European language team.

The latest version of A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, version 4, Second Printed Edition, was published online some days ago, and its printed edition has been approved, so that it is available for purchase at Amazon.

We will try to provide members with the second printed edition of the grammar, to replace their previous versions at no cost. This will be made at a slow pace, using the benefits obtained with the sale of the second edition, i.e. ≈1$/copy for Amazon, ≈5$/copy for CreateSpace.

Dnghu has obtained – as it was previously announced – the official registration (and registration ID) from the Spanish Registry of Associations, at the Spanish Interior Ministry.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

These are the latest developments at Dnghu:

• A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition, is prepared for its publication as a printed book, and we are awaiting the arrival of the proof copy to accept it and let it be sold at Amazon, probably within the next days. We wanted to offer immediately the final version for download, even though not all links might work. It is a full revision of the previous version (Pre-Version 4), itself a full revision of the previous one (Version 3), it has 824 pages of information concerning Proto-Indo-European reconstruction and the Modern Indo-European language, and it enters a stable version of the language system, after more than 3 years of improvements to the first version of the grammar. That’s what we have been doing during the last months, if you wondered why we didn’t publish new reports. Just in case you have been following the development of the Second Printed Edition at CreateSpace, it was ready for publication on the 1st of September, but the lexicon included was improved and we needed to rewrite the sections affected by that change. We hope to update the full website (not only the English translation) in the near future, to add the newest edition of our main resource. As always, we will thank any criticisms and suggestions of changes to the grammar.
• We hired a new DSL connection, moved the location of our web server, and later installed our OpenSuse configuration on a new dedicated server (HP Proliant) purchased for the Association by our sponsor, Academia Biblos. We apologize to all visitors that might have experienced (and that might experience) some problems since the 21st of September, but we are still working on it. We expect to double the previous bandwidth and general performance of the Association’s web services.
• The Association is going to have its official inscription (and inscription number) within the next days. As you might know, that was promised by the Spanish Interior Ministry more than a year ago, but it seems that this time – after 5 attempts – is for real. No more excuses about ‘the name not being Spanish’ and the like.
• After the newest developments regarding MIE and the Association, we will improve all sections in our website accordingly, including the homepage, texts translated into Indo-European, the Proto-Indo-European Lexicon, the resources, etc. In the meantime, the Second Edition of the grammar should be enough to see the most recent linguistic developments concerning the modern language system.
• The “Indo-European Network” concept has been cancelled. It was conceived as a network (or ring) of associations and organizations related to Europe or the Indo-European language and culture. We abandoned it due to the lack of support of enough number of organizations. We thank them for their support.

And that’s all for now. A lot of changes ahead, though.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

The Association opened itself for international membership a year ago. Before its first birthday forces the first subscribers to pay one more year, we have decided to turn ordinary subscription fees to zero, and to make the standard payment the only type of subscription, following the example of other international non-profit organizations.

The decision is based on two main reasons:

1. The Association was firstly conceived as a regional one. Members have subscribed from different European countries, expecting to find an international organization. The strength of such an international Association is based on the number of members who can collaborate with each other in the different regions and countries, and this is difficult to achieve with a 15€/year obligatory fee.
2. Subscriptions have been based on the benefits of membership, which have changed over time because they were excessively optimistic, especially regarding the benefits of “academic courses”, “conferences” and “meetings”, which haven’t been held. It isn’t fair that early members pay more for benefits and events that will be held in the future, and it could make them abandon the Association expecting a better future value of the subscription fee.

We have therefore left just a standard unique 15€ fee as obligatory, because the 7€ unwaged/student fee isn’t rational anymore. Nevertheless, those subscribers who made use of that discount will be automatically turned into standard members. We didn’t consider leaving a lower standard fee to avoid the membership of unresponsible people attracted by low prices.

Also, given that the Association will (hopefully) become a strong organization in number of willing members, the linguistic aspect will need the collaboration of the old concept of the “Europaiom Consortium of experts”, which is now the Proto-Indo-European Language Foundation (Eur. Dnghu Bhudhnós). Its internal and external organization rules will be written down in the Association Wiki.

Other development of February was the inclusion of ads in all public wikis, to help cover the monthly expenses of the Association.

Your Indo-European language team.

Following the initial release date previously announced, the main collaborative textbook published by the Association, A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, has entered a pre-version 4 stage, heading for its second printed edition.

Appart from the expected changes in MIE concept (viz. EIE, PIH, etc.) and the correction of errors and ommissions, the structure has been revised and new sections added, thanks to the unending contributions of Fernando López-Menchero. Among them, a “Indo-European in Use” section and a phonetical transcription of common vocabulary from English into Indo-European, with Latin meaning for clarification.

The Pre-Version has been published as another revision of the first printed edition (v. 3.85), to allow more contributions and corrections until this (fourth) full revision of the grammar is finished. Publication of the second printed edition is due before the end of this year.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

These are the latest changes and projects of the Association:

1. After debating the possibility of opening free international membership for all, restricting actual membership (with voting rights) just for local people – to compel foreigners to develop their own Indo-European language revival organizations in the different countries, instead of relying in our tiny Association for the whole European Union – we eventually decided to maintain the statu quo, letting foreigners become members, and offering new ways to make proposals and vote them online, to elect and become eligible to the Association board, so that we can grow as a real European Association; indeed without losing the hope of seeing more local and regional associations being created elsewhere to promote and support PIE revival… For that purpose we installed a Wiki, accessible from the homepage, opened for all.

2. We installed the OpenID extension for all the Wiki websites and the WordPress blogs used at Dnghu for news, latest reports, personal bloggin, etc. This way, instead of looking for a common database registration of new users, we hope to offer everybody the possibility to collaborate everywhere at Dnghu’s website without a need to register, not even once if the user has already an OpenID account.

3. We offer now translations of the Latest Reports section into 7 more languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish. Indeed they are still only automatic translations, as we lack the necessary team to work with translations, but with these WordPress blogs and with OpenID we hope to get more contributions to improve the translated news.

4. We are also preparing two more language projects, aimed at improving the current European Union’s language policy: Languages World to offer an improved World language collaborative compendium, which should include proto-languages as well, to improve current compendia like the Ethnologue; and PrÅ«siskan, a Wiki to work on the revival of the Old Prussian language. For now they are just ideas, we hope to get them working soon.

Your Indo-European language team.

The latest changes in the Association:

1. We decided to change our Indo-European Language Association domain name language policy, from a standard of “.eu” domains and translated terms written as is in the language, we want to offer a more unified writing, thus using almost only “.org” and names without dashes – but for indo-european.eu, which was the only available, and indoeuropeo.eu in Italian, because the .org is reserved for the Spanish version. At the same time, we hired some more domain names in Danish, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian or Slovenian.

2. Our main aim was – and still is- to revive Europe’s Indo-European as the national language of the European Union, not the common Late PIE, because of the difficulties in reconstructing it with sufficient confidence. However, given that:

1. Speakers of languages derived from Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic, Proto-Celtic, Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic are not the only ones interested in reviving Proto-Indo-European in one of its dialects.
2. Reviving Late PIE phonology with exactitude is still as impossible as in Saussure’s time.
3. As with Proto-European (or Europe’s Indo-European), we know the shape of those Proto-Indo-European dialects that existed ca. 2500 BC.
4. All reconstructed PIE dialects are different to some extent only, especially in phonology, but very similar in morphology and syntax,.

We want to offer the possibility of using all the reconstructible PIE dialects as of 2500 BC (see a map), i.e. Proto-European or Europe’s Indo-European (IE IIIb); Proto-Indo-Iranian or Proto-Aryan and Proto-Greek (both IE IIIa); and Proto-Anatolian, a dialect of IE II; as well as discussing the theoretical aspects of Proto-Indo-European reconstruction. All of these projects have a Wiki dedicated to discuss its reconstruction and the modern shape the language should have today (europeanlanguage.org, aryanlanguage.org, helleniclanguage.org, anatolianlanguage.org and protoindoeuropean.org), and another Wiki dedicated to its experimental use, as a kind of Wikipedia-Wikisource-Wikinews (europaiom.org, arijam.org, hellenika.org, anatali.org, respectively).

3. We have consequently closed or rearranged the websites dedicated to write in Europe’s Indo-European: they will be concentrated in that website mentioned above, europaiom.org. Only the Indo-European etymological Wiki dictionary will remain.

With those changes we expect to concentrate efforts, attract more collaboration and spend less.

Your Indo-European language team.

Newest developments of the Association:

1. Our webservers didn’t function correctly until the 20th of July, probably since June – i.e. just the period we couldn’t take care of them – due to some new configuration of the DSL by Spanish main telecom Telefonica, or, according to them, because of the “wrong installation / reparation by the technical service” last year, which was actually made by their official service . Apparently, then, we have to withstand technical problems of our Internet devices once a year…
2. The new webmail accounts are already working using Google’s Gmail. That means some relief for our servers, and an easier administration of the accounts. There is also an email list for (allowed) subscribers at leizda@dnghu.org. The first member blog has been created at the dnghu.org domain, too. All those options are still only opened for members, but we hope to be offering them for simple registered users in the near future. You can begin requesting them right now, though.
3. After the failure of Orkut’s group, probably due to the limited success it has in countries different from Brazil and India, a new group has been created in Facebook, in the hope that it becomes a popular social network in Europe. More than a way to communicate between members, it should be a forum to spread and discuss the project with those interested in it.
4. Some more grammars have been donated to European public and university libraries. New additions might be followed, as always, from the library donations page. There are some 170 books already, and hopefully we’ll be sending some 20 more to libraries related to the European Union (in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) in the next weeks. After that, more copies of the printed edition will probably be needed to continue this donation campaign, or else stopped for some time.
5. The Association is represented by the French Chauvet Cave Bear logo, because it represents the oldest tradition/history of Central Europe and therefore its original, prehistorical inhabitants. We eventually selected a symbol to represent the language (and therefore projects like Europaiom), the Danish solvogn or “sunwagon“, because that is probably the oldest representation we have of what are (and were) common symbols of those who spoke Europe’s Indo-European in the latest PIE community in Northern Europe until ca. 4.000 years ago: the horse and the wheel, or, better, the horse and the wagon. The solvogn (of ca. 1800-1600 BC) was most probably made within an already differentiated Proto-Germanic community, but is nevertheless representative of the common ancient Indo-European language and culture of Europe. It therefore represents the purity looked for with the modern language system in relation to the prehistorical European language we try to revive at Dnghu.

Your Indo-European Language Association Team.

Fra’ Matthew Festing, the new Prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta), a Catholic order based in Rome, considered a sovereign subject of international law – hence the smallest European state – has received information regarding our Proto-Indo-European language revival project and a copy of our grammar.

We contacted the recently elected Grand Master in the hope that PIE revival be supported by the Order, because it could be another way to help unite Europeans under our common values and culture, being easier for them to take such ‘linguistic policy’ decisions than for any other European state, as it cannot directly affect their citizens. If any measures are adopted, it would nevertheless be meaningful for Europe and the European Union. The Grand Master accepted the present and said he was “delighted to have it” and the he “would read it with interest”.

We are grateful for his polite answer and encouragement.

Your Indo-European Language Association Team.