Indo-European : European Union’s National Language

There has been a growing interest in our Schleicher’s Fable, especially in the different known Indo-European proto-languages, as they appear in our Indo-European Grammar.

I personally just wanted to show the different (mostly phonetical) evolutions in Indo-European, in the differentiation among early dialects, and I used the Schleicher’s fable in Proto-Indo-European just to show the possible early outputs.

This weekend we received 3 more mails correcting it, and these made up ten already, which is a lot taking on account the limited interest shown in other, more controversial parts of the grammar.

It is obviously not the best part to correct and contribute to, for Modern Indo-European to be revived, but it’s still an interesting starting point, as people seem to feel more comfortable with the immediate ancestor of their own languages than with Proto-Indo-European itself.

New versions have been made with the indications of an Indo-European expert, and the latest corrections and additions have been uploaded to the Schleicher’s Fable: The Sheep and the Horses (PDF).

It is now opened as a separate document, with its own versions, and with its link from the homepage. We hope to keep correcting it, to add versions in Proto-Albanian, Proto-Daco-Thracian, Messapian, Ligurian, and even Indo-Uralic, Eurasiatic, etc.

Thank you for your comments and corrections, sorry for not being able to answer you personally.

Carlos (the 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.

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 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.

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.