Indo-European : European Union’s National Language

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.

The Forum des Langues du Monde, organized by the Carrefour Culturel Arnaud-Bernard since 1993, is the most important language fair of Toulouse, and one of the best known in southern France.

It shows the diversity of languages spoken in the region of Midi-Pyrénées - with a territory larger than 8 EU member states -, from Occitan to Indonesian, as they are found in Toulouse metropolitan area, which (with 1.117.000 inhabitants in 2007) is the fifth-largest in France and the fastest growing in Europe.

Its main objective is therefore to entertain people and make them think about the relationship between language and society: thus, popular entertainment events and high level debates will be offered at the same time in the public square, and opened to all visitors.

On Sunday 1st June, in the Place du Capitole, stands will present more than 120 languages, represented by more than 80 associations and individuals interested in sharing their knowledge. A professor responsible for the Russian language stand, and recent member of the Indo-European Language Association, will also share information about the Proto-Indo-European language revival project for the European Union.

We believe it is a great oportunity for those interested in joining Proto-Indo-European revival to contact nearby colleagues, and to cooperate and create a permanent, self-governing PIE revival group in France; and maybe also in other countries, given the international projection of Toulouse.

You can download the official programme (PDF) in the website of the Carrefour Culturel Arnaud-Bernard.

You can also read the Language Fair Programme in French:

Samedi 31 mai de 17h à 25h : Capitada !

La Capitada (”la réussite”, en occitan) est une sorte d’hommage à la Place Jamaa el Fna de Marrakech : elle rassemble des artistes en tous genres, anonymes, qui viennent librement animer la place publique par leurs talents.
La place du Capitole accueillera des conteurs, chanteurs, musiciens, poètes, conférenciers, magiciens, slammeurs, rappeurs, danseurs, cirqueurs, blagueurs, théâtreurs, marionnetistes,…, tous réunis pour exprimer à travers la pluralité culturelle la convivialité toulousaine.

Dimanche 1er juin de 10h à 20h : Forom des Langues du Monde

Sur la place du Capitole, des stands présenteront plus de 120 langues parlées à Toulouse, représentées par plus de 80 associations.
Beaucoup d’animations sont au programme : ateliers de calligraphie (arabe, tibétaine, chinoise, persane, coréenne, japonaise,…), initiation à l’alphabet cyrillique, déchiffrage des caractères cunéiformes, ateliers d’écriture sur table d’argile, chants populaires et polyphoniques, danses (capoeïra du Brésil, moringue de la Réunion, folklore andorran, danses mahoraises,…), expositions visuelles bulgares, art du Bonsaï du Japon,… et beaucoup d’autres surprises tout au long de la journée.

Au-delà des langues, la pensée du monde

Cette année, le Forom des Langues du Monde fera l’objet d’un débat sur la proposition de Déclaration Universelle des Devoirs envers les Langues et le Langage. Des juristes viendront donner leur point de vue sur l’intérêt juridique de ce texte, formulé par Henri Meschonnic.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

These are the latest developments of the Dnghu Association:

1. We have opened formally the possibility to participate in the authoring of the second edition of the book A Grammar of Modern Indo-European. We’ve added new download links, and the whole Word file might be downloaded as DOCX (original) and DOC format, and the book cover is available in Photoshop PSD format, both files in the latest available version.

2. Because of the interest in the printed version of A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, we have arranged a bookstore with Amazon, to let visitors choose among those books we deem interesting for Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European studies. This way, we recommend the books and at the same time obtain a percentage of Amazon’s earnings.

We have also added a tiny Ad link on Dnghu’s main websites, following our 2008 policy of recovering some money spent in non-associate visitors with Google ads.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

These are our latest projects and developments at DNGHU:

- Some Bible texts have been translated, thanks to the interest of M. Bobeck and B. Barrois - we didn’t translate the Genesis and Psalms 90 and 104, as expected, but give it some time. Available texts include the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, Credo (Nicene Creed), the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the beginning of the Gospel of John.

- We will keep working on the Indo-European online language lessons website. Any corrections or additions are indeed welcome.

- We have included some 30 new research papers to our Indo-European Private Online Library for members only.

- We are collecting new addresses of European Universitary and Public libraries, and expect to send a hundred donated books more in the next weeks.

- We are planning to participate in a project about Comparative Medical Terms and Concepts in Indo-European Tradition, especially of Indian, Greek and Latin texts, but obviously including the oldest texts available of every Indo-European linguistic branch. If any of you would like to take part on it, feel free to contact us.

- We have received an ad from the ExpoLingua Berlin, the 21st International Fair for Languages and Cultures - they really know who to target… If some of you (rich) readers would like to donate the necessary amount to participate, we would be very grateful to you . You can visit their website to read more about it.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

During the last month and a half, there have been some improvements:

1. We’ve begun a basic language learning project and favoured it over the rest of Indo-European development projects (news, encyclopaedia, texts, etc.). We want to help build a community giving them some basic knowledge, instead of just addressing those who already study (or have studied) Proto-Indo-European or Indo-European linguistics. We’ve just opened the online Modern Indo-European language lessons website at dnghu.org, still only in English, powered by Drupal.
2. We’ve dedicated some time to keep building our main website, translating it into some new languages, like Polish, Russian, Greek, Czech, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Catalan, Slovak, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Danish or Slovene. If the other “main” languages are mainly poor machine translations, these new ones are in a still lesser category, and could be tagged more or less like bad automatic translated menus… In other words, they are there for people to be able to collaborate directly correcting mistakes and adding information from the English website, as they could already do with the “main” languages. Any correction or addition might be (as always) discussed at our Indo-European languages forum.
3. We opened the membership for the Dnghu Association back in February. We don’t want to advertise it too much, as our aim is not (yet) to develop the participative side of our society, but to offer to those interested the possibility to help our association with small donations, with the return of being officially members of the Association (apart from other benefits we’ll try to give them) and thus being able to take some ordinary decisions. The actual problem is that the society is legally based in Spain, and important decisions are taken in our town; therefore, legally speaking, to be a member right now will mean generally no participation in important or strategic decision-taking. To sum up: for those interested in being members and help us a little bit, there is a new option called membership, which gives some legal rights, quite limited for those living outside Spain. For those not interested in taking that step, participation and discussion in our public projects remains open for all.

In the following weeks we’ll try to:

• Further develop the online language lessons, including some audio files to give a better idea of the Modern Indo-European pronunciation.
• Publish some officially translated texts, like prayers and Bible passages, either here in this website or in the Wikis for Indo-European texts
• Send more printed copiesof the Indo-European grammar to European libraries; we have almost completed a new list of another 100 public and university libraries, we’ll see if and when we have enough time to prepare the packages.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

These are our latest developments following the beginning of the new year:

1. We have eventually published our Indo-European Translator-Dictionary (again) before it works correctly, in a pre-alpha or aleph version. We preferred to face the challenge of possible fatal errors of MySQL and a worse character output (bad UTF encoding) than to wait for months to release it. It is the next generation of our WLQO dictionary-translator project at SourceForge, which has been abandoned due to the comeback of the Open Translation Engine (OTE) project, on which WLQO was based.
2. Because our main sales (since we first started to sell our Indo-European Grammar in November) have come from Spain, we decided to publish it in other (international) book stores, namely those people already trust, and which are flexible enough for us to be able to modify our files - from Amazon to Lulu, from our Editor to us, there is a greater degree in flexibility, but a lesser degree in consumer confidence, we guess. As always, those printed editions are prepared for those who don’t want to read our work in their computers, or who prefer professional editions rather than their own printer’s outputs.
3. More than 2 years ago we decided not to earn money with Google ads, because most free projects rely on donations, and we wanted to look like what we are, a not-for-profit society. We knew then, and it’s been confirmed, that most donations come from the USA and other similar ‘donation-cultures’; we kept the hope that some enthusiast could provide us with some means to cope with our costs, but apparently no such person is interested in (or even knows) the Indo-European language revival, as we have still the same (Spanish) institutional donors. Because we have (apparently*) thousands of visitors each month, we think it’s fair to get something back from those visitors, and are thus offering different Google ads, which in no way disrupt the normal functioning of our site.
4. *Apparently the visit numbers (for a static website like ours) were big - up to 50.000 visits a month following Webalizer, which takes on account every page load, up to 10.000 unique visitors after Awstats , which sifts the data -, beginning on April (following the publication of Indo-European Revival news in Spanish media), growing until August, and growing each month a little bit after that. Now we are not so sure of those numbers our server logs give, and want to have official statistics. We know that most log files can only be made from our server, as documents in PDF, RAR, ZIP, images, etc. are not logged by Statcounter, and that it uses javascript (and therefore many users go unaccounted for), but at least we’ll have a good, independent stats counter to be used, especially for future petitions of (private or public) subsidies.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

María Teresa Batalla’s Doctorate in Documentation & Library Science, which is centered on Thesaurus software (as applied to linguistic terms), has been finished with a Honours degree, and should be read before the end of 2007.

The Spanish-only terms may be accessed at the online Thesaurus Linguistics; she hopes to get some help before (or even after) reading her work, to add more terms and to translate all of them into different languages, so that it is more useful.

About our project of teaching “European Languages” as a school or high school subject, we wanted our Regional Government to support us, if not with subsidies, at least officially; apparently they don’t want to get involved in the project until there is a real community behind it, so we’ll have to rely on our private funds again for some more months. We’ve had a tough summer of work and study, so we didn’t worked the learning books as expected, as we hoped to dedicate some public funds to work it collaborating with a private editor. Therefore, we won’t teach the subject this semester as expected, but maybe next semester or even thereafter.

About the expected collaboration with the Faculty of Library Science and Documentation (shared with Journalism/Audiovisual Communication) a judge has ruled that a part of its main building - a newer structure added to the old faculty four years ago - be demolished, as it was built without the necessary care for the historical monuments surrounding it. We will wait to see how this all ends, but taking on account that less than 10 people applied for Library Science last year (and that this year might get worse), this could be another academic year without any specifical agreement with our organization.

Our main interests right now are then based on private efforts and collaboration:
1) Promoting the language revival: sending the free books to different libraries, contacting university professors and students specialized in linguistics, etc.,
2) Writing and speaking in Indo-European: news sites, translating texts, Wiki editing, etc., so that the language shows its potential by the end of this course and
3) Organizing the efforts under a well-structured international corporation.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

We have received the first 200 books, and we will start sending them to different libraries tomorrow. The editor Imcrea Editorial has worked a press release to be distributed among journalists, which we reproduce here:

Report (revised automatic translation):

In order to understand each other, the 27 EU member states have to trust the biggest translation service of the world: more than 4,000 people work in the corridors of Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg. Around them circulate the Spanish-Pole interpreter, the Spanish-Danish, Spanish-Finnish, Finnish-Estonian, Finnish-Bulgarian, Bulgarian-Maltese… And so on until completing the 506 possible translation pairs that are necessary to have 23 official languages translated into each other. Not even the UN, with six working languages, wins in multilingualism.

All this distilled communication system bears an equally scandalous cost. The most recent data, of 2005, speak of 1,123 million euros invested in translations and interpreters throughout that year, which makes up 1% of the total budget of the EU, 2.28 euros per capita. Speaking in English, one of each 100 euros that leave the European box is used so that the 27 can understand each other. Whenever a language is added, the EU must add to the set of translations 25 million euros more.

Except for Finland, Hungary and Estonia [about 17 million inhabitants], the rest of Europeans, 97% of the population, have been speaking some language derived from Indo-European, a reconstructed language spoken 4,000 years ago in Europe and Asia. So why not recover this mother language, culturally neutral and common to all?

If some measures are not carried out, English, that has become the de facto lingua franca of the EU, will continue to prevail through the use of the argument of its world-wide weight. The Swiss François Grin, specialist in Linguistic Economy, published in 2005 a report which emphasized that Great Britain, thanks to the predominance of its language, gained between 17,000 and 18,000 millions euros annually because of the need of the other member states to learn English.

The Dnghu (’Language’) Association is an international, non-profit organization located in Europe, whose main mission is to promote the Indo-European language and culture. Its primary concerns today are developing the Modern Indo-European Grammatical System, to bring the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language to its full potential, and teaching it as a second language for all European Union citizens. Our long-term objectives are the adoption of Modern Indo-European by the European Union as its main official language, as well as the use of Indo-European as the main international auxiliary language, to overcome present-day communication barriers, derived from the cultural implications that arise from the use of English as lingua franca.

The Dnghu Association is financed by a private Spanish education company, Biblos, and its work is supported by Extremadura University professors. The regional Government of Extremadura and other public economic agents have also supported the Dnghu projects’ present and future implementation.

After creation of group, the presentation of the project and the legal incorporation of the Association, the last hit in our task to revive Proto-Indo-European is the publication of “A Grammar of Modern Indo-European” (at the moment only available in English), which tries to agglutinate in a single volume all the knowledge acquired in the last two centuries of Indo-European studies, and to provide at the same time an appropriate writing system and updated vocabulary to the modern needs of the language speakers. In order to enable a quick distribution of the book - and thus also the learning of the language - the Association has published it under free licenses, so that anyone can copy, publish and redistribute it freely; in addition, almost all the units printed will be dedicated to free donations to different European libraries.

Nota de Prensa (original Spanish version):

Para hacerse entender, los 27 países constructores de la Unión Europea han tenido que poner en pie el servicio de traducciones más grande del mundo: más de 4.000 personas trabajan en los pasillos de Bruselas, Estrasburgo y Luxemburgo. Por ellos circulan el intérprete de español-polaco, de español-danés, de español-finés, de finés-estonio, de finés-búlgaro, de búlgaro-maltés… Así hasta completar las 506 parejas de traducción posibles que surgen por tener 23 lenguas oficiales. Ni la ONU, con seis idiomas de trabajo, le gana en poliglotismo.

Todo este alambicado sistema de comunicación conlleva una factura igualmente escandalosa. Los datos más recientes, de 2005, hablan de 1.123 millones de euros invertidos en traducciones e intérpretes a lo largo de ese año, lo que supone un 1% del presupuesto total de la UE, 2,28 euros por habitante. Hablando en castellano, uno de cada 100 euros que sale de la caja europea es destinado a que los 27 puedan descifrarse entre sí. Cada vez que se incorpora una lengua, la UE tiene que sumar a la partida de traducciones 25 millones de euros más.

Salvo Finlandia, Hungría y Estonia [unos 17 millones de habitantes], el resto de los europeos, el 97% de la población, habla algún idioma derivado del indoeuropeo, un idioma hablado hasta hace 4.000 años en Europa y Asia, ya reconstruído en su mayor parte ¿Por qué no recuperar esta lengua madre, culturalmente neutra y común a todos?

Si no se lleva a cabo alguna medida, el inglés, que se ha convertido de facto en la lengua franca de la UE, seguirá utilizando el argumento de su peso mundial para imponerse. El suizo François Grin, especialista en Economía Lingüística, publicó en 2005 un informe donde subrayaba que Gran Bretaña, gracias al predominio de su lengua, ingresaba entre 17.000 y 18.000 millones de euros anuales provenientes entre otros apartados de la necesidad del resto de países miembros de la UE de enseñar el inglés.

Dnghu (”lengua” en indoeuropeo) es una organización internacional sin ánimo de lucro situada en Extremadura que nació con la idea de promover la lengua y cultura indoeuropeas. Su principal objetivo hoy es el desarrollo de las reglas gramaticales básicas del indoeuropeo para que adquiera todo su esplendor como lengua moderna, y la enseñanza del indoeuropeo como segunda lengua en la Unión Europea. Su objetivo a largo plazo consiste en la adopción del indoeuropeo por la Unión como su principal lengua oficial y nacional.

La Asociación Dnghu está financiada por una institución educativa española, la Academia Biblos, y su trabajo es apoyado por profesores de la Universidad de Extremadura. La Junta de Extremadura y otras instituciones ya dieron su apoyo concediendo un premio al proyecto en el I concurso “Empresas de la Sociedad de la Imaginación”, organizado conjuntamente por la Universidad de Extremadura y el Gabinete de Iniciativa Joven, con la participación de diversas instituciones públicas en su tribunal.

Tras la creación del grupo, la presentación del proyecto y la fundación legal de la Asociación, el último hito en el camino para revivir el indoeuropeo lo constituye la publicación de la “Gramática del Indoeuropeo Moderno” (por el momento sólo disponible en inglés, “A Grammar of Modern Indo-European”), que pretende aglutinar en un solo volúmen todo el conocimiento adquirido en los últimos dos siglos de estudios de los grandes indoeuropeístas, y proveer al mismo tiempo a la lengua de un sistema de escritura apropiado y de un vocabulario actualizado a las necesidades modernas. Para agilizar la distribución del libro – y así también el aprendizaje de la lengua – la Asociación lo ha publicado bajo licencias libres, con lo que cualquiera puede copiarlo, editarlo y redistribuirlo líbremente; además, casi todos los ejemplares que se impriman se dedicarán a donaciones gratuitas a distintas bibliotecas europeas.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

After the last weeks of holydays, some Dnghu members are back to work. We are all, however, engaged in different activities in the University - Doctorate, Exams, Academy (private) lessons for the exams, and language courses.

Recent matters to be solved at DNGHU before the beginning of this academic course:

- The decision on the public subsidies for the project of teaching European languages are due for September after informal reports, even though no date has been fixed. Even if we don’t receive the public approval, we have made some agreements with private schools to teach this experimental subject in the 2007-2008 course, instead of Latin or ‘Classical Studies’.
- We haven’t accomplished some of our ToDos for 2006-2007, like the PodCast in Indo-European, the news’ website, the renewal of Dnghu’s site (and its correct translation into Modern Indo-European), and many other little projects. We hope to get all this done before Christmas.
- Some domain names haven’t been renewed by our provider while we were on holydays, in the last 20 days; we hope this will be solved in the next days without further problems. Sorry for the inconveniences to all of you Wiki editors.
- The printed copies of our Indo-European Grammar were supposed to be available on 20th August; there was a problem in the output (it was not a “Distiller” document, as the printer wanted, but “only Acrobat”…), so we might have to wait a little more time till Editor and Printer agree on the final price. In any possible case, we hope to have most of the 200 copies sent to different European libraries by the end of October.
- Apparently, some spammers are using our domain wlqo.com and others to send thousands of emails; many anti-spam software out there (stupidly) answer automatically to the spammer email’s address, and we’ve got hundreds of spam warnings a day, so we have to delete thousand of mails. So the spammed servers are ironically spamming us… We will try to read any possible mail, but please share any information in the forum instead, just in case we mistakenly delete(d) your email.
- We want to have a site for links on linguistics, where every possible free online resource is listed or downloadable, so that every visitor can learn the (Proto-)Indo-European reconstruction - and Proto-Language/Nostratic, Indo-Uralic as well as Indo-European early dialects and proto-languages. If you know good websites, post them in the Forum, so that our work is more easily done.
- We will probably open a period for easy membership to our association, so that every interested individual or organization is able to participate in future decisions and elections.

That’s (almost) all for now.

Your Indo-European Language Team.