Indo-European : European Union’s National Language

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.

Just as Prof. Feraud, from the Russian stand in the Forum des Langues de Toulouse, describes the event yesterday, with the public reaction to the presentation of the Proto-Indo-European language revival project:

There was a good attendance to the Language Forum, maybe in the thousands. Some hundreds of leaflets have been distributed among visitors - see an example of 4 leaflets in A4 size.

We’ve got in touch with many language associations and groups with variable reactions:

• Complaints about the complexitiy of Proto-Indo-European declensions by some speakers of non-inflected languages.
• Polite and positive reception by most other stand representatives of European languages.
• Very good understanding of the bases of the project especially by the Indian and the Modern Hebrew ones, because of evident reasons.
• Future collaborations with another Language Association and a European institution of Toulouse are forseeable, thanks to the contacts made.
• AND, some critics also from the Esperanto stand: “the language for the European Union already exists, it is Esperanto…”

Your Indo-European Language 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.

NOTE: If a copy arrived to your library, please send us a confirmation mail

We have eventually sent dozens of printed copies of A Grammar of Modern Indo-European to different European public libraries, mostly within the European Union, and all of them to University libraries.

We are adding the libraries that were sent a copy (or those with available copies of the grammar) to our Map of Library Donations, including the library address and its website if available, to facilitate a quick query for those interested in reading the book in its printed version.

We plan to send at least a hundred copies more in the following months, but we want to see how our donations are (or aren’t) welcomed by the different university and city libraries. If some copies aren’t accepted or just don’t arrive to the expected destination, we will be able to send another copy to the same library, or to a different one in the same area. We try to keep a balanced distribution of books depending on different factors such as number of inhabitants of the target city (or metropolitan area), number of students/readers who use the library, university prestige, etc.

Remember that if you are a member of a public or private institution dedicated to higher education and/or research, you can request free donations of the Modern Indo-European grammar.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

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.

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.

One of the latest changes made in our websites has been the move of our Indo-European Language Resources‘ weblog to an old subdomain, namely that of the Indo-European Dictionary-Translator, which is now been revised for its use in www.indo-european.info.

We expect to post all new resources, and the improvements made to the old ones, in that blog, so that we can use this one for our main Indo-European Language Revival news only.

That’s all for now. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year - and happy (second) birthday to the Dnghu Association!

Your Indo-European Language Team.

Your Dnghu Team.