27 NOV 2009
- What is the Dnghu Association?
- Why was the Dnghu Association created?
- Is the Dnghu Association a Corporation?
- Who founded the Association?
- I want to help. How can I?
- How do I join the Dnghu Group?
- I am considering starting a new MIE-related project, can I?
- May I use Dnghu logos and trademarks?
- What is Modern Indo-European about?
- What is Modern Indo-European not about?
- But Mr. X (a famous linguist, politician, philologist, journalist, etc. you trust) believes that
Proto-Indo-European is an invention...
- I want to learn a second language. Should I learn MIE?
- When and how do you expect MIE to succeed?
- Why "Europaio" and not just 'European' or 'European language'?
- Why did you change "Europaio" for "Modern Indo-European"?
The Dnghu Association is a Non-Profit Organization headquartered in Badajoz, Spain,
whose main aim is to provide EU citizens with a national language
to facilitate citizenship, communication and trade.
The Dnghu Association was formed primarily to:
- provide a framework for open, collaborative language development
projects by supplying hardware, communication and business infrastructure;
- create an independent legal entity which can be funded by
public institutions and
private companies and individuals, and be assured that those resources
will be used for the public benefit and do not enrich its founders;
- provide a means for individual volunteers to be sheltered from
legal suits directed at the Foundation's projects; and,
- protect the works and names of Dnghu, from being abused by other
individuals or organizations.
Yes. It was incorporated as an Association in Spain in February 2007.
The Dnghu Group had two founding members,
Carlos Quiles
and Mayte Batalla,
as well as four permanent supporters:
two distinguished professors of the University of Extremadura, experts in Economics (DPhil L.F. de la Macorra)
and Library Science (DPhil M.A. Muñoz) and two English philologists, DPhil N. Vermeulen and DPhil F. Batalla.
You know better than us how you could help. Are you a philologist or linguist? a good teacher?
a server administrator? a software developer? do you represent
a local or regional authority that would be interested in funding us?
Be it work or funds, either collaborating with us or independently,
every help to revive the Proto-Indo-European language is indeed welcome,
and we hope you can find enough open
projects to participate in.
If you would like to contribute with your voice and vote to our projects, decisions and actions,
you can join us as member.
If you are not interested - or just unsure if you want to join us -, then just
collaborate with us
in your free time!
Yes, indeed. We firmly believe that the revival of Proto-Indo-European
needs a social network bigger than what we could ever achieve with Dnghu alone.
Yes, if you respect our licensing over Dnghu's brands (i.e. "Dnghu", "Europaio"),
as well as our works' Copyright (Attribution) and
Licences (usually a dual CC-by-sa and GFDL).
If yours is a project which respects our licences, and does not use our names, there must be no problem. Also,
there should not be any problems at all in linking your works or sites in any reasonable way to Dnghu brands,
if our basic linguistic standards are respected - i.e. if you do not link to our language revival project something
completely unrelated to it.
Modern Indo-European is the modern language system based on an old, reconstructed language,
spoken by a prehistoric community,
which is usually called North-West Indo-European by
linguistic scholars. The Indo-European language we are referring to is the
immediate common ancestor of many modern European languages, usually called Europe's Indo-European.
If Latin is the mother of
Romance languages, and (Proto-)Germanic that of the Germanic languages, then Europe's Indo-European
is the mother of Latin and Germanic, i.e. the grandmother of modern Indo-European languages of Europe.
Modern Indo-European is thus a set of grammatical rules, designed for
Dnghu's Indo-European revival project.
The Indo-European revival's main goal is to substitute present-day linguae francae from third parties
within the European Union for a single, natural and common National Language.
Modern Indo-European is not (exactly) about studying prehistoric
Indo-European peoples and languages. It is not about uniting Iranians, Indians and
Europeans with the rest
of the Indo-European world against the other half. It is not about discovering the truth about
the European Homeland or the PIE (or other IE) Urheimat. It is not about substituting EU Member States' regional
or national languages. And it is certainly not about Indo-European (or non-Indo-European) speakers' race or genetics.
Well, you can believe whatever you want. We don't enter in the unending field of personal opinions
and ideas, as everyone can have (and usually has) a different one.
Some political groups want to think the Holocaust never happened; some religious groups believe that
evolution is an evil invention of atheists; some businesses say that climate change is an invention and
the necessary measures to stop it are designed to harm the national economy; and choose something
you must rationally accept as evident,
and you will find someone who believes it's not. Now, it's impossible for us to
confront history and science (i.e. academic knowledge, historical linguistics, comparative grammar, PIE reconstruction)
with personal opinions and ideas. Peer-reviewed research papers on Indo-European linguistics keep appearing,
and the scientific community generally achieves more or less consensus
over certain questions, and that is what we look for when we try to revive Proto-Indo-European as a spoken
language. Everything else - and especially such personal opinions you might be considering right now - is generally irrelevant
for this project.
Maybe. We recommend you to learn English better if it's not your mother tongue,
or any other present-day Indo-European popular
language, as you probably just want to communicate more easily with foreigners.
Indo-European is still a language for experts and fans ready to deal with multilingual issues and lots of
exceptions and irregularities to be systematized in the more compact - and still naturally flexible - final modern output.
However, a good intermediate choice for those who to want to keep an eye on MIE's development would be to learn
Sanskrit, Old Greek or Latin, or even early Germanic
or Balto-Slavic dialects, as they are all natural approaches to Late PIE dialects and to modern languages alike.
We expect Indo-European to acquire some official status within ofthe European Union
in the long term, maybe in 20-40 years; if it became official (in any possible way) in 10-20 years it would mean a
great success for Europe, as it has
a poorer political and social cohesion compared to that of the Land of Israel a hundred
years ago, where Hebrew became official after 40 years of its revival proposal.
If it is still not used by anyone around 2050, it would possibly mean that
Indo-European is becoming another language revival failure, as it has happened with Latin in the
European Union after its abandonment in the 19th c. (the "recent Latin" revival,
promoted in the "Congrès International pour le latin
vivant", 1956, now mostly abandoned and forgotten),
Ancient/Classical Greek in Greece (also "puristic" Greek, the so-called Katharevousa),
or Classic Coptic in Egypt in the 19th c., promoted by the Coptic Church.
The term European is not identified as a language name today; a single,
distinctive name like (non-inflected) Europaio was deemed easier to recognize
as the language name in its initial stage,
and thus easier to be promoted everywhere, especially for IE speakers.
We took the idea of naming it Europaio from the Basque example:
their language is normally referred to as "Euskera" instead of Basque in the
different languages of Spain, being thus the same name used throughout the country.
The term "Europaio" has been linked somehow to new terms like "Volapük", "Interlingua" or "Esperanto",
artificial languages that are referred to with their own language names. Our aim is to revive a natural language which
has a historic name (Indo-European) and an academic forname (North-Western), hence the need
to reflect that reality against those conlangers (or conlang fans) who deliberately want to put
Modern Indo-European on a level with their invented experiments.
Unlike Proto-Greek or Proto-Indo-Iranian, Europe's Indo-European was a dialect continuum, heir and latest
bastion of the parent common Late Proto-Indo-European language, and therefore the common name
"Indo-European" is correctly used for that
common European language, with the adjective "Modern" differentiating it from the prehistoric language.
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