Indo-European language revival

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.

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.

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 paà­ses 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… Asà­ 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 sà­. Cada vez que se incorpora una lengua, la UE tiene que sumar a la partida de traducciones 25 millones de euros más.

Salvo Finlandia, Hungrà­a 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 reconstruà­do 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 Economà­a Lingüà­stica, 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 paà­ses 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 indoeuropeà­stas, 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 asà­ también el aprendizaje de la lengua ““ la Asociación lo ha publicado bajo licencias libres, con lo que cualquiera puede copiarlo, editarlo y redistribuirlo là­bremente; 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.

As we commented before, we had requested some weeks ago the next bandwidth in the scale offered by our ISP, due to the increasing visits and downloads from our websites.

Yesterday, they just disconnected the phone from their central, and after 8 complaints and 15 hours, they have eventually shown up and arranged the new connection, which – for the moment – shows only a great download rate, but the same upload.

Sorry for the inconveniences, we hope that the new connection is worth the troubles.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

The last version of A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, 1st Printed Edition, has been released after some corrections in its content and design (now version 3.20):

- Some mistakes in design have been corrected.

- The frontpage slightly modified, using vector images and .tif background image.

- Minor syntax and translation changes, as well as other corrections, have been applied to the content. Some information has been added.

- Machine translations of the whole text have been added, either as already translated text (to facilitate the quick reference in the most used languages) or as links to Altavista/Google/Tranexp web translation engines.

Thank you for your comments and corrections. The printed copies will be available in 15-30 days, after the editor and the printer have agreed on the final changes. The first donations of printed copies to European libraries will probably begin in september.

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.

Until recently, we didn’t deem it useful to print our material (but for ISBN and Legal Deposit issues), as our grammar was very simple and the information contained was freely copied and redistributed.

However, as our regional community is interested in offering copies of our grammar in their Public Libraries, and they’ve offered some public means to print the material, we are going to make another major release, possibly named 3.0.

Major changes will include, thanks to the help of some specialized readers (mostly scholars from Spain):

1. Major corrections of obviously wrong reconstructions (especially from Greek and Latin), and adding of different possible reconstructions.
2. Vowels and Laryngeals’ question (only to show how the oldest IE phonetic sounded like)
3. Thorough explanation of IE dialects when possible, and that chapter left for the end of the book.
4. Occlusives: palatovelars are excluded (again) from the writing system, and the reasons explained.
5. Changes in noun declension and in its classification into different numbers, now trying to follow the Latin one
6. A thorough revision of verbal inflection.
7. Corrections of mistakes in English and other languages
8. Syntax: Instead of waiting for a new big second volume, we will try to include all known common features of the oldest dialects of PIE into a small chapter.
9. Formal issues: Notes are left for another independent (and cheaper) volume in black and white, ordered by Note number and also with PIE roots ordered alphabetically, to facilitate look up of etymologies and MIE words while reading the main book.

That book will be available first as a printed copy (some 500 pages) and possibly some time thereafter in PDF for download, and it will still have a CC-by-sa and GFDL licence. We plan to order some 50 copies, but if we receive more individual orders we will order some more – we don’t plan to earn money with this, though, so the price will be more or less that offered by the public editor.

Your Indo-European Language Team.

Here it is, Modern Indo-European Grammar Version 2.0, a large file (around 4Mb) to download from our servers or from external file servers.

Because of the recent news about our project in the Spanish media (El Mundo and Spanish Television News “La 2 Noticias”), and the growing interest in the project, we have decided to release now what we had already fixed, instead of waiting till the rest of the grammar was properly revised (especially the verbal system).

As the licence is now GFDL/CC-by-sa, it is not really important whether the grammar is completely correct, as anyone can now copy, improve and redistribute it freely.

Also, we will keep publishing minor revisions (beginning from version 2.0), and hopefully make another major release together with Volume II, Syntax, before this summer.

Thanks to all our readers and contributors.

Enjoy!

Your Indo-European Language Team.

Yes, almost a year ago our project of an official DNGHU GROUP began, after the publication of the first – now almost seen as an amateur start – “Europaio grammar”.
We are now preparing ourselves to release its revised edition of that – mainly prescriptive – work, what will be a thorough Modern Indo-European Grammar.
In our new edition, some major changes have been made, but especially minor aspects (like lots of tiny etymologies, interesting vocabulary, dialectal differentiation, language history, etc.) are improved to support a natural Proto-Indo-European revival, as a Modern Indo-European language, instead of the simplified (for some almost artificial artificial) language system we have developed until now.
Because this was our first year, instead of releasing minor changes as new grammar versions, we wanted to develop diverse approaches to experiment and see what people liked and disliked the most. We think it was a good idea, and now we expect our improvements to let us begin using Modern Indo-European immediatly, instead of just waiting for more linguistic regulation.
We will whoop it up in a few weeks with the official inscription of the already incorporated Spanish Association – hopefully the first of many independent organizations worldwide -, the public release of a (really) free-licensed Indo-European grammar, new projects, major web changes, etc.

Your Indo-European Language Team.