Indo-European : European Union’s National Language

We received some days ago an informal recommendation (from the Extremadura office in Brussels) to participate in the European Union Lifelong Learning Programme : Languages, to promote the teaching and learning of Indo-European languages and its reconstructed parent language, Proto-Indo-European; that could help us receive European public funds and make our project known outside Spain.

We haven’t the necessary time to prepare such a funding project right now, and we don’t know any potential European partners - the project must be transnational. If some of you (members of high schools, higher education institutions, language associations/institutions, etc.) are interested in joining us to create an Indo-European-language-learning-project, and would like to apply for the subsidies to develop an activity, please contact us.

We could certainly engage some academic departments of the University of Extremadura and probably obtain most of the necessary paperwork for the EU prepared by their members.

You can read more about the possible actions and activities to develop as well as some examples of accepted activities here.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

Short news:

1. New printed copies of our main work, A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, are now available for sale at 20€ (30$), either directly online through the Editor’s online shopping cart (only in Spanish), or requesting a copy per email, sending us your data, preferred payment option, etc.

2. A Nostratic language wiki has been installed at nostratic.org, to add every possible information about available knowledge on reconstructions beyond Proto-Indo-European.

3. Given the amount of websites and projects available at the moment, we decided to include an extensive list in our homepage.

We contacted Iniciativa Joven two weeks ago, and hope to get soon some news in Spanish media about the publication of the grammar and about other developments of our Association, especially those achieved after the latest official press release before the summer.

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.

The title states the three main reports this week:

1) We are currently adding some new resources, not only on the Proto-Indo-European language and about its reconstruction, but also on other old Indo-European dialects, to help students of Indo-European languages get free online resources more easily. For example, we added yesterday Monier’s (Public Domain) Sanskrit Dictionary in PDF.

2) About the public subsidies the Association is applying for, we have also requested some financial help to take part in some European education and language fairs this year. We want to promote the project, the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, and indeed the common culture and linguistic heritage of the majority of Europeans, and the Internet cannot be the only way to do so if we want to succeed in our Indo-European language revival project.

3) We are experiencing some bandwidth problems, due to the unexpected number of visits - from little more than 5.000 visits a month since December, we got more than 12.000 visits on April and May, and around 50.000 visits in June. We haven’t still promoted the website among university students, but seeing our difficulties in keeping a good upload rate for all visitors, we will wait (at least) until August to begin a wider promotion. Meanwhile, we’d like to see those who already know it discuss the possible changes to be made this summer, about every possible aspect of the Associatin and its work.

We expect to get a better connexion soon, hopefully thanks to private donations. If the visitors’ rate keep increasing as in the past months, we’ll have to begin thinking about using Google adsense (or other ads’ company) and hire some more professional expertise, though, because normal donations and friends’ work won’t be able to cope with our needs.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

The Dnghu Association, with the collaboration of the University and some high schools within the region of Extremadura, has elaborated a project to promote the teaching of a more general subject in the high school, “Indo-European languages of Europe”, to substitute the current general subjects of “Latin”, “Greek” and/or “Classic Culture”, in 10th and/or 11th Spanish school years.

Such a subject should obviously still include Classic Languages and Culture, but also an approach to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language and its dialects, especially those of Europe, viz. Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, Greek and Albanian, as well as an introduction to the features of Indo-Iranian and Armenian.

Our first pilot experience is planned for next semester, and for the moment two schools and some University professors have agreed to participate. We want to study especially the differences in knowledge as to European languages and culture, between the students who follow the course and those who don’t, to prepare a thorough research to be sent to the Spanish Ministry of Culture, to the European Union and to Switzerland if - as expected - students who have received the lessons on Indo-European show a greater linguistic comprehension and knowledge of European cultures.

The deadline for us to send the project is next week, just in case you have some changes you want us to make in the general idea - no details will be published for the moment, though.

If you want to participate with us in this experience, either for your school or other public or private institution, or maybe as a (paid or voluntary) professor, please send us your request to oinion@dnghu.org. We will probably accept such changes made until September 2007.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

At least three new main releases have been made since our last report:

1. Modern Indo-European Grammar, Vol. I (Morphology), version 2.10, already published as Full Second Edition. We will see how the volume on MIE Syntax is written and revised from now on.
2. Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary by Julius Pokorny (originally Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch), revised and formatted as tagged PDF for quick reference.
3. Proto-Indo-European language revival for the EU, our Foundation Project of 2006, revised as a European Association project for 2007.

All publications are made under a dual Free/Libre licence Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike v. 3.0 and GNU Free Documentation License v.2.

For more on minor version changes on this and other common works, please refer (and suscribe) to our Indo-European language resources’ blog.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

Due to some delays in the (re)writing of the new Modern Indo-European Grammar, the Dnghu Association has decided to follow the next schedule:

1st. Publishing of the first revised edition of Modern Indo-European Grammar, Vol. I, Writing System, Phonology and Morphology. Probably in the next week or two, we still have some formatting pending. (If you are new to our project, go on and read the old one; you will love the change…)

2nd. Try to be more open to newcomers, firstly by answering past mails: sorry to those of you who e-mailed us in the last month, we just had too many tasks - the opening of another Biblos centre, the University, moving the Association headquarters and servers, our jobs,…

3d. Revise and improve the web schemes, e.g. avoiding the excesive use of “Europaio” instead of Modern Indo-European (or simply Indo-European), focusing on simple webs to collaborate united (and not scattering efforts), uniting europaiom-sindhueuropaiom web pages into a single portal for common MIE resources in different languages, building an encyclopedic portal in Indo-European, changing Dnghu’s FAQ to adapt it to new developments, etc.

4th. Try to follow a good pace in posting news in Modern Indo-European, also in podcast if possible, to help with our “teaching and learning” objective, and with a more precise syntax (v.i.)

5th. Publishing of Modern Indo-European Grammar, Vol. II, Syntax. This is a huge work, and we hope to get some specialized help; we’ll wait to see if it’s better to publish it in small parts - to discuss openly the final output - or (as with Vol. I) in major releases.

To date, we can’t know the timetable for such a roadmap, but with some work (and your help), we think we could finish them before this summer.

Thank you all for the last Indo-European year. Happy anniversary (the gift still to come)!

Your Indo-European Language Team.

As the number of visitors increases, it becomes obvious that those coming from Google searches are also becoming the majority - instead of those coming from fixed external links, which was our best source until recently.

Now, even though we cannot know how Google’s pagerank (and thus search results) function, we do know that domain names are important.

Our recent strategy was to distantiate ourselves from Esperanto and other constructed languages’ projects; we wanted to be identified just with Indo-European language revival, with the modern use of a natural - althoug reconstructed - language.

Following this recent strategy, we have changed our europaio and sindhueuropaiom subdomains - a cheaper and more simple way of presenting the project - with different domains, selecting the most important languages in terms of population and Internet use, and also depending on the project (.eu for europaio, .org for sindhueuropaiom): indoeuropeo.eu (it), indo-europeen.eu (fr), indo-european.eu (en), indoeuropejski.eu (pl), indoeuropeiska.eu (sv), indogermanisch.eu (de), indo-europees.eu (nl); also proto-indo-european.org (en), indoeuropeo.org (es), indo-europeen.org (fr), indogermanisch.org (de), indoevropejskij.org (ru), indo-europeu.org (pt)

Your Indo-European Language Team.

as of 26 Jan DNS names don’t seem to have spread widely, so you may not be able to see subdomains en.newas.eu, es.newas.eu and fr.newas.eu depending on where you connect to the Internet from

This new Dnghu project, Newas (”News”) is not directly related to Indo-European language revival, but to the Group’s general aim of building collaboration-driven, multilingual communities for free licensed knowledge within the European Union.

Apart from this general objective, we hope this site helps us improve our Indo-European language news website, Europaios (”European”), in choosing the most interesting news to translate for the public, instead of selecting them ourselves.

The software (Pligg, under GPL) only has English (default) French and Spanish translations; we will wait to see if the page is used by our readers, to decide if we will offer it in more languages, translating the necessary files. If you are interested in having one Newas site in your language right now, just contact the Group.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

A new webblog has been configured in our Web servers to host free Indo-European languages’ resources.

We wanted to host a wiki site, but eventually believed that such a domain name under a Wiki engine would be in great risk of becoming the spammers’ objective for different language courses and learning promotion.

The blog, however, is indeed open for contributions, directly (in the form of comments) and indirectly, using emails to recommend us other websites and books. We plan to use it to host different ebooks and other resources, as well as general reports about other websites hosting free language resources.

Your Indo-European Language Team.