Indo-European language revival

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.

We have decided at Dnghu to modify some resources, as (we think) they were causing people and time to leak out from our most valuable projects. They are:

Sindhueuropaiom.org, the Indo-European IAL web portal, which won’t be linked that much from Dnghu’s site. The site was designed to host a different, older and more phonetic view of the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, to be used outside Europe – instead of the Europaio grammatical system, which is mainly based on the Indo-European Northern (or European) Dialect. We think it has been somehow confusing to mix it with Europaio in Dnghu’s website, making people believe we were trying to reconstruct (or even construct) two different languages, when our only aim was to facilitate the development of a more flexible and International grammatical system besides our easier, European-based one.

Sghola, Tekstos and Skientia free knowledge projects – which have nothing to do with Indo-European but for the names – have been (earlier as initially planned) taken over by Academia Biblos, to offer different school and university resources. As far as we know, Sghola will not be the projects’ central – as we promoted it -, but a commercial site for e-learning. However, we hope to take advantage of this change by using the portal in the future, maybe to offer free or commercial e-learning courses.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

[tags]Indo-European,IAL,European,international,auxiliary,language,conlang,e-learning, web,moodle,Europe,science,free,resources,scientific,review[/tags]

The Dnghu Group launches a new website, tekstos.org, powered by MediaWiki, the Free Encyclopedia’s software, to promote the free translation of the Bible into Indo-European. The name Werdho (in Vocative) is the Indo-European (northern dialectal) word for Logos (Jesus Christ as Logos), usually translated as ‘Word’ in Germanic languages and ‘Verbum’ in Latin.
As with other Indo-European language projects, content will be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, and we expect Bible texts in different languages to be translated into Indo-European in Dnghu’s Europaio grammatical system.
Even though Indo-European public projects haven’t still the necessary support to host more community-driven websites, we had our timetable of public releases and expenses, and want to achieve the different milestones within time. The domains were purchased as planned, and whether the site will be used or not depends on people.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

15/11/2007 [Legacy]

The Dnghu Group is taking over the administration of Iventia.com, a website for Spanish minority languages and historical dialects, from Academia Biblos. It will become a website for free portals in different minority languages, hosted specifically at Dnghu’s web servers. We try to balance our probable decision to create a stronger (political) movement for EU linguistic and political unification, Oinion.

The main aim is to offer what Wikipedia can’t: unified and flexible free web portals, prepared to host almost all kinds of knowledge, whether original or not. Since the first Wikipedias were published in minority languages, it was obviously wrong to impose the same firm objective of the English version (strict encyclopedic knowledge), for Wikis whose real objective is to promote the language itself.

Thus, many minority languages Wikis are stuck between little encyclopedic knowledge – a few science articles written in languages which don’t even have an official orthography – and some articles which are only of interest to those who want to speak the language: its grammatical features, proposed orthography, the places where it is or was spoken, etc. These ‘encyclopedic’ articles usually stop in some hundreds, because nobody can post their own works.

Which language should have an Iventia portal instead of a Wikipedia is a matter of choice: the Catalan language, for example, is enough known, officially regulated and spoken to have its own free online encyclopedia with Wikimedia. The revived Prussian language, on the other hand, clearly shouldn’t, as there is no official written standard, only a few can speak it, and only encyclopedic articles can’t deal with what the revival project needs. For languages and dialects in between, a person willing to create a flexible portal will be able to request one.

The following steps have been – or are being – taken to remodel Iventia, to clearly complement Wikipedia:

1. More Flexibility: it will not host only encyclopedic knowledge. Other original works (such as grammars, orthography, linguistic articles) can be posted and, when popular, promoted as featured content of the Wiki.
2. Licensing Freedom: the content is licensed GFDL, and thus it can be translated directly from the Wikimedia projects, but Creative Commons licences can also be used if an author wants to publish original works under more restrictive licenses.
3. Integration: News, articles and original research and texts can be published in the same Wiki website, and promoted to the frontpage.