To all of you well-minded Esperantists and the rest of artificial languages’ supporters:
First of all, thank you for your interest in Proto-Indo-European language revival. We appreciate your critics, whether constructive or (as usual) just annoying mails. To answer you all (we won’t do it individually),
- No, we are sorry, but we didn’t unite at Dnghu to support languages different than Proto-Indo-European or other natural Indo-European languages or dialects.
- No, we don’t think your games/experiments are usable, or fit, or even languages in the strictest sense, no matter the great critics/success/support/number of speakers/history/etc. you think it has or had.
- Either yes, we knew about your great inventions, or no, we didn’t, but anyway we are not interested in learning or supporting them, however great you think they are.
- You can read more about the usual questions emailed or posted to Dnghu about linguistic inventions in the Indo-European language blog by a co-founder.
Dnghu was created and works to discuss, talk, administer, give support, etc. to the widest variety of (Proto-)Indo-European studies possible, with the main objective of supporting PIE revival for the European Union, in the form of a Modern language. Please, don’t think we haven’t considered your old alternatives before trying to accomplish such a difficult and ungrateful task.
We are here to gather people to work together on our aim, not to convince you one by one about the advantages of reviving PIE.
Yours sincerely,
Your Indo-European Language Team.
P.D. – Obviously, how Wikipedia, Digg or other collaborative websites classify (or write about) Proto-Indo-European or its revival is not necessarily what we actually are or are doing: You shouldn’t trust any content outside dnghu.org without reading what We say we are doing in our association.
Interesting project. You write about the language all the time. What about producing some more texts in the language itself – so that we can see what it looks like? I would welcome paralel texts – english and Indo-European – in this blog.
Who will be interested in a language if it appears that those who promote it aren’t able to use it? This is very common among inventors of artificial language, and I understand that you don’t want to be compared to them.
Well, produce indo-european texts – frequently – and then we’ll see …
Ok. We will accept your comments as well-minded constructive criticism, and you – and those who think like you – will in turn consider the following facts:
a. Proto-Indo-European study is about reconstruction of a natural language (whether there are speakers or not), spoken some millenia ago, more or less like the study of Mycenean, of Vedic Sanskrit, of Ancient Coptic, etc.
b. Modern Indo-European is about making PIE usable – whether we write in MIE or not doesn’t change our success, as our objective is to develop a modern grammar and to promote it – you didn’t know about it and now you know.
c. Only because Asturian, Breton, Welsh, etc. are languages with less written texts than Esperanto does not mean that they are more artificial – we have some sample IE texts, but it is not our priority.
And, again, you can all contribute writing and helping, also independently if you don’t like us.
We do everything free and for free, we have hundreds of projects, few helpers, and we have to answer dozens of Esperantists’ (and other inventions’) flames & trolls… And still you want us to work more and better for you to believe in IE not being artificial; how nice.
You might want to be less aggressive towards people who give constructive criticism is you want people to continue reading.
I’m personally very interested in this project, but seeing you reply in this way to such a normal comment really puts me off the project.
Please keep up the good work, and I’m looking forward to the second book. I think you guys did a very good job at the book about the morphology and found a successful way to simplify the Indo-European verbal system into something anyone can use.
But please, you’re not going to get a following by throwing dirt at anyone that has something, constructive, or inconstructive to say about this project.
We try to keep the good forms in all replies. But it is difficult when we receive mostly flames and different trolls’ mails, comments and posts, and few collaborators.
It seems to me that the first comment was another Esperantist trying to post a ‘politically correct’ critic, implying that any language – especially MIE – is “worse” than Esperanto, just because we refrain from writing in IE until we know what we are doing – something we say in the Frequently Asked Questions since 2005.
If you come to the conclusion that we are too bad (childish, aggressive, etc.) to collaborate with us, because you deem our collaboration-driven sites too open, you can make your own projects based on our free resources – you don’t need to discuss with us any aspect you dislike of our PIE revival project, free licenses are enough for automatic feedback. But if you criticize us, then at least expect an answer (like this post)…
Carlos Quiles: “And for the rest of you, remember, if you come to the conclusion that we are too bad (childish, aggressive, etc.) to collaborate with us, […]”
Yes, I just did. I wrote a blog about your equally aggressive comments to me and it’s sad that you do this as a habit to everyone else: paleoglot at blogspot
Naturally, the more you do this, the less friends and collaborators you’ll have.
By the way, you compare your holy revival of MIE, a conlang only based _loosely_ on PIE as reconstructed by academic consensus, to the revival of Hebrew, a language with deep religious and cultural significance for an ancient people who lost *2 million* of their loved ones to the Nazis in the Holocaust. Not an intelligent comparison whatsoever as far as I’m concerned.
But hey, whatever floats your very small boat. Keep being angry, aggressive, offensive and irrational and let’s see how far you get with this.
= Glen Gordon (paleoglot at blogspot)
Now examine the facts:
1. A group of some Europeans (we) write a project about reviving PIE for the EU, and try to accomplish PIE reconstruction to make it usable for all people possible.
2. We ask for help, and receive some valuable comments in the forum (like those of Phoenix), and many mails from different experts pointing out this or that “bad” or “incorrect” or “not-so-good” reconstruction, which we always try to correct and answer as politely as possible, however intransigent and unpolite some comments may seem.
3. Many unspecialized journals as well as personal blog posts out there (like yours) either criticize or support the project, but anyway most of them without good reasons, just mixing some europeanism or euroscepticism (or political scepticism whatsoever), with little knowledge of PIE or IE languages – whether you consider me childish or not, I guess, is not important, since you obviously made your whole opinion about the project well before downloading or reading anything about it.
Therefore, if I made a comment on your blog you consider “aggressive” was because you supposedly maintain a blog open to discussions about PIE, and wanted to criticize our project, but just dismissed it as “protopolitics”, thus clearly mixing your socio-political opinions about Europe, inventing that we reconstructed a “ec-” (when we clearly reconstruct oocus and repeat it in various parts of the grammar since v. 2.0), asserting that we place the Urheimat in the Urals – when our aim was never to say anything the like, having just made some highly hypothetical maps according to Gimbutas’ widely accepted hypothesis, to facilitate comprehension for newcomers, and also saying that – unlike you – we make innovations, when in fact we are usually criticized because we maintain traditional positions (viz. our non-reconstructed laryngeals) –
THUS, clearly, you didn’t read the Grammar but for some paragraphs, and still wanted to write a “specialized” comment, and still wanted us to ignore it, as if we didn’t have the same right as you to surf the web and criticize those things we dislike, not to say the critics about us or our projects.
Whatever you might think, I have been very polite with every professor or expert in linguistics that has criticized the project, and all (no, really, I mean all) disagree with our ‘approaches’ or ‘ideas’ or ‘reconstructions’, either because it is very difficult to obtain a well-reconstructed PIE, either because this or that expert, this or that school, this or that research paper, etc. reconstructs it differently, or because it is politically very difficult to do the same in Europe as what was made in Israel – it had nothing to do with the Holocaust, by the way, but with zionism, which happened well before WWII -, or because they just don’t believe there existed something like Indo-European, and that it is an invention.
Anyway, just read again your first post in your super dooper blog, read this comment you made here, and consider the fact that it was you who first tried to gain visitors to your blog by easily criticizing our project openly in the Internet, with inconsistent reasons; then you gained my attention and a full answer (making me lose my time), and now you try again to gain visitors to your blog, and try to make me lose my time beginning a struggle on who-knows-what-kind-of-mixed-socio-political-lingusitics-scepticism-relativism-critics, possibly on how aggresive I am, or on how we want to dominate the world or whatever other conspirations from the Dnghu Association.
Well, as you yourself asked your visitors to do with our Grammar (which I indeed support), I ask vistors of Dnghu now to do the same with your actions: “Question Everything”. When it looks like trolling, and smells like trolling, it usually IS trolling.
— Of course I have to accept your comments as normal because I myself began answering some Esperantists’ flames publicly with this post, an action seen as wrong by some very good Esperantists, who don’t even consider such trolls Esperantists – I guess I am beginning to understand now why it’s usually read everywhere “don’t feed the troll”…
Enjoy your flame’s stats; I hope you understand in the meantime that we don’t work at Dnghu to make you (or anybody else) feel bad, but just to achieve our aims and dreams.
Carlos: “Many unspecialized journals as well as personal blog posts out there (like yours) […]with little knowledge of PIE or IE languages[…]”
Carlos again: “unlike you – we make innovations, when in fact we are usually criticized because we maintain traditional positions (viz. our non-reconstructed laryngeals)[…]”
If you understood the field of IE, you would recognize that Gimbutas’ views are widely criticized as much as they are popular (amongst modern amateurs who read outdated books). Now, you can’t have it both ways: You can’t call yourself an amateur and then beat your chest to me about how knowledgeable you are at the same time. You’ve already proved to me your lack of study countless times by these very things you assert.
I assure you that the academic consensus you will find if you walk into any recognized university worldwide is that Indo-European has laryngeals. Three, in fact, based not only on Anatolian languages, but on the various other languages that show indirect effects of their presence. Those who think it doesn’t have laryngeals are the sorts with an agenda less noble than the pursuit of knowledge. If you aren’t aware of the logical problems of the 50-year-old Kurgan Hypothesis (some of which I explain in my blog) and the _very ancient_ reconstructions lacking laryngeals like those of Pokorny (also explained on my blog), it’s fair to say that you’re dancing in the pale moonlight of the lunatic fringe, adopting any old view that suits your fancy.
If you want to maintain the “traditional” and thus the _now invalid_ form of Indo-European that is in itself outdated by more than 50 years (ie. Pokorny’s reconstructions are no longer acceptable in the modern day, I assure you), then you fundamentally contradict yourself since you then make the term “Modern Indo-European” illegitimate. Afterall, you openly make it a mere “conlang derivative” of PIE by “tweaking” IE to your fancy. So it is no more “Proto-Indo-European” than *any* of the currently used modern European languages today who already have millions of speakers more than MIE. Furthermore, this MIE of yours is simply indistinguishable from the more popular Esperanto in the end. This is not the “Esperantist view”. This is a logical assessment of your project. You’re pompously reinventing the wheel if you truly think you can ignore that.
Certainly, anyone who thinks that Indo-European will honestly solve political problems and unify Europe’s diverse linguistic situation is quite obviously ignorant of those who are valid citizens of Europe but who speak Basque and Finnish instead. Finnish is from Uralic and Basque is an isolate language unrelated to any of the other modern European languages. This is a clear reason as any as to why your whole “organization” is nonsensical, anti-academic and doomed to have already failed before it even starts.
Now, do I or anyone truly say this because we don’t like you? No, most of us I’m sure could care less who you are as an individual. Emotions have no place in debate here, Carlos. Personally, I only care about ideas, and I only care about the logical validity of an idea. Your ideas are inescapably logically invalid because they are replete with self-contradictions as explained above. What makes your attitude abysmal though is not that you make mistakes, since to err is endearingly human, but that you attempt desperately to mask these errors with aggression and a fascist-like desire to squash criticisms with your iron fist and over-assertive, under-researched words. So be it, I suppose. It only comes across as hopelessly silly as the erratic plots of Ed Wood’s B-movie classics. If you want to carry yourself across better, you need to adopt a different strategy that’s less antisocial.
1. I didn’t say you disliked me, but the project of reviving IE for the EU – you disliked first the project – possibly because of your euroscepticism, which I consider a legitimate personal opinion -, and then criticized the grammar with a “specialized comment” (then based on knowledge and/or expertise) without having read it – something I cannot accept as easily as your personal opinion -, and because I answered your post thoroughly (or maybe because “how I answered” your post, as I was not very happy to see the work of months being so easily dismissed) now you dislike me too, and also the whole group because of me, which doesn’t make any sense, if it’s not because you disliked the idea behind the project since the beginning.
2. you yourself doomed any subsequent critics made in your blog, however interesting or well-made they may be, because you firstly criticized it without knowing anything about it, and asserting that you had. Anyway, your critics will always be welcomed here – as sb very interested in PIE – , and I hope to see you by Dnghu often criticizing it for better – to be less a “conlang” as you put it.
3. Even if I said (and will always say) that I consider myself an “amateur” and that you are “maybe an expert”, that means neither that I don’t know a lot about PIE, nor that you know anything more than Wikipedia articles and the like – I just wanted to be polite, as I don’t know you.
If you were interested in Modern Indo-European, you would probably agree with us in that it certainly has to be based on more traditional views, as the newest ones could be discarded in the future – however, you could as a probably advanced student (as Phoenix) make your own suggestions about how it should look like, and – if we don’t follow your theories – even make your own project, that was the point.
I think that, whatever the final output, we would be speaking more or less the same Indo-European – as sb else put it in an email, it is not so important whether people write “pater”, “p’ater”, “pateer”, “pahter”, “phter”, “pxter”, “phhteer”, etc., as long as we all understand each other knowing that we speak the same language. And it is indeed not important for IE revival whether Proto-Indo-Europeans lived 7.000 years ago in the Urals, in Taiwan or in Canada – it’s just sth useful for people to understand that PIE was a natural language spoken somewhere by a group of prehistoric people long ago.
Sorry to hear the project is doomed for you, and you consider me and/or the whole group “antisocial” – the Internet is a tool to exchange ideas globally and immediatly, and as such we use it.
Sorry again if I were too “aggressive”, I will keep trying to answer you next time as politely as I can.
Sorry if you consider the project or our group already “a failure”. Since we started, most people have said something similar, always with different ideas – if we had to care about why it is “already a failure” for most people – including family, friends, public and private institutions, sceptics, leftists, nationalists, neonazis, neocommunists, Esperantists, sceptic Latin and Greek professors, etc. – , we would have never begun…
Begun _what_ though? The Third Reich with MIE (or should we openly call it “Japhetic”) front and center?
– Nazis believed in a unified Indo-European.
– You too believe in a single “Indo-European”. (It never was a “single” language or people because nomadic pastoralism just doesn’t work that way.)
– Nazis felt that cultural/linguistic diversity was a disease to be cured.
– You too obsess over eliminating cultural/linguistic diversity via a single language, MIE.
– Nazis hated criticism and academics.
– You hate criticism and academics.
– Nazis saw Jewish conspiracies at every turn.
– You see Esparantist/neocomm/nationalist/academic conspiracies at every turn.
Congratulations, you’ve thoroughly proved you are a kind of Nazi. When (or if) you finally ever realise that cultural and linguistic diversity is *not* a problem, you’ll be able to let go of your ego and “hard work” in order to actually _help_ the human race unite in a *real* sense, not send it back into the Dark Ages.
We like cultural and linguistic diversity, especially that of European languages and dialects – as you could see if you had read something about our projects -, and want to promote it going back to our IE roots; English, on the contrary, could be seen as an imposition of a foreign language to most Europeans, especially as it comes from the US might since WWII, and is learnt just as lingua franca, i.e., ‘to travel abroad’, so to speak, not to collaborate and work within a common country, which is (we believe) at the core of the European Union’s future.
MIE is not about such things you mention, but I see you don’t care. Just read our FAQ if you are interested, we didn’t write them to repeat it again and again to everyone mad at us or our projects.
I hope you calm down, and care about your name appearing everywhere on the net, insulting us as “nazis”, “antisocial”, “conspiranoics”, etc. publicly without any reason for that…
It is recorded for posterity that you came to _my_ blog to boldly insult me, afterall. I’m hardly commenting here for my health.
You yourself say I don’t have the right to make a play on words and call your MIE “proto-politics”. Why? Who are you to decide what anyone says? No one. No one, that is, but a bully. My points are based on reasoning. There is no rational means by which an artificial language of any kind, including MIE, can replace the most popular natural languages in the world whose speakers outnumber any of them by more than 100 times! Logic 101. The probabilities of your success are staggeringly minutial and even if successful would guarantee no constructive result at all, despite your intents.
And like a Nazi you adopt non-mainstream emotional rhetoric like the outdated Kurgan Hypothesis to envigorate your ahistorical propoganda of a “singular” Indo-European people that *CANNOT HAVE EVER* existed. Linguists understand that “Indo-Europeans” (a loose _un-united_ group of pastoralistic nomads) spoke many dialects of PIE and had most likely had many “cultures”, however one may define that. It may be hard for a non-linguist to wrap their minds around, but Proto-Indo-European is merely a purely abstract “averaging out” of the individual IE dialects that surely must have existed to contribute to it (ie. look up ‘dialect merger’). If you sincerely don’t understand still, please read in more detail in my blog.
Read it over and over until these infectious 19th-century views of yours are finally purged out of your mind. My blog entry includes valuable book references and hopefully easy to understand logical reasoning which disproves your blind assertions. While Gimbutas has some merit like any scholar, she is quite controversial because she indulges so readily in sensationalistic neopagan fantasy. No doubt there are many Wiccans out there who are sympathetic to her idealized concepts and as such her theories might be called “widely accepted”. They’re just not “widely accepted” by qualified IE specialists.
I hope that you can learn to one day let go of these farflung absolutist ideologies of yours (ie. “MIE is THE answer, not that crappy Esperanto, or Mandarin Chinese”, “Linguistic diversity MUST be remedied because societal multilingualism is somehow impossible”, “I’m an amateur but I DEFY anyone else’s expertise”, “The Kurgan Hypothesis is THE ONLY theory and you’re stupid for not accepting it”, “Everyone who disagrees with me is an Esparantist NEOCOMMUNIST”, etc). I don’t even know what you’re ranting on about half the time, really, and I’m not interested in joining along in your disturbing psychoses. I know that your dnghu plan is doomed, perhaps because I’m a good chess player and I can see more than three moves ahead. Just talking to a university professor might help you iron out many of your unfactual delusions. Professors don’t bite, Carlos.
I suspect that oftentimes irrational mandates are born out of an unresolved inner dissatisfaction in one’s personal life but it is a drug as insidious to the mind as heroine. So may you find a way to conquer your foremost vices. Good luck.
Thank you for the Good luck, Glen.
Please don’t post your website again and again in the comments, as it may seem more spam than just flames.
I will always try to let comments here, however disgusting or absurd, or obvious flames they may seem to us; but evident spam will be deleted – you had 4 links in the above comment, I had to delete the links and approve it manually, as the software blocks it.
Please calm down and consider for a moment the fact that we are neither nazis nor from the KKK; it may help both of us to understand each other’s positions.
Good luck to you and your research too. I will try not to answer you in your blog anymore, so that you don’t feel attacked.
Carlos.
dnghu.org personnally i think the MIE project has some potential.
Though some people feel threatened despite the fact that MIE is only designed for the EU. No matter what happens English can exist nicely next to MIE as trading or Neo-European language. This would greatly reduce the costs of those armies of translators in the EU parlement and the chance of translation errors. In politics semantics and context can be decisive during the political and international processes. So hopefully will MIE will also be catalyst of european bonding of cultures and independent nations. Glenns fears are unfounded and he shouldn’t be affraid because english will remain the language in the british commonwealth.
I am surprised that you have not heard about Uropi. Uropi is an international language whose vocabulary is based on the Indo-european roots common to all, most or, in the worst case some, Indo-european languages: for example “dnghwa” > linga, sâwel* > sol, mâtêr* > mata, wòdr / wedor* > vod, kwôn* > kun, sed-* > sedo, sistâmi, stâyô* > sto, mer-/mrto* > moro, menô > meno, meyô, meit(ô)* > meto, baubô > bawo, bhreg-* > breko, deikô* > diko, domâyô* > domizo, didômi* > davo, dhûmâyô* > fumo, edmi* > jedo, eimi* > ito, ésmi* > so, gegona* > geno, geusô* > guso, gyeuw(y)ô* > givo, ghr(e)bh-* > grabo, kelô* > celo, klinâmi* > klino, kup(yô) / kwep-* > kuvo, kus-* > kiso, etc…, etc… there are thousands and thousands of them. As a result, Uropi has many common points with all Indo-european languages from Sanskrit to Welsh or Breton, from Lithuanian to Latin, from Swedish to Albanian, from Greek to Russian, from Spanish to Armenian, from Dutch to Fârsi. It is a really international language unlike Esperanto or Interlingua which are essentially made up of Latin words. Its grammar is very similar to English grammar. Its pronunciation is close to Italian.
If you want to know more you should visit the Uropi website
http://uropi.free.fr/
How can we revive P.I.E ? How can we make a modern Indo-european language out of it ? This is the challenge. The only scientific approach is to observe and analyse REALITY. What is reality in our case ? Certainly not the polemics between paleolinguists to determine what form a P.I.E root or word MAY have taken (CF your examples for the term « phtêr »). What we are certain of are the forms these roots HAVE taken in the various Indo-European languages throughout history. Nobody can question that the offspring of a hypothetic PIE word « sâwel » are « sol » in Spanish, « zon » in Dutch, « heol » in Breton, « sol » in Swedish, « sûrya » in Hindi and « saulé » in Lithuanian for example.
In other words, to make a modern Indo-European language, it is far safer to start with the P.I.E root, study what has become of it in Old Slavonic, Old High German, Sanskrit, Old Norse, Avestic, Hittite, Tokharian, etc… down to Farsi, Albanian, German, Russian, Danish and so on…
The M.I.E word should be the SYNTHESIS of all the terms derived from a common P.I.E root in all Indo-European languages. Of course such a task takes years and years to achieve.
Moreover, if M.I.E is to become a common language for the European Union – and I do believe that the E.U needs a common language to hold it together : in fifty years’ time the European Community has never become a « UNION » ; its citizens don’t feel European but French, English, German, Italian, etc… and see other Europeans as competitors rather than fellow-citizens, among other things because they can’t communicate with each other, except in a very poor English. Generalizing the use of English would only serve US interests and turn the E.U into the US backyard and a Chinese or Indian dumping ground. English is not a neutral language, but a « killer-language » which has already wiped out a sizeable number of « small » languages throughout the world (CF Halte à la Mort des Langues by Claude Hagège, a French linguist). The only guarantee to preserve the diversity of European languages is a common European language for the E.U. –
So, if M.I.E is to become a common language for the E.U, learnt and spoken by 500 million European citizens, it has to be as SIMPLE as possible. For example, its words should be closer to present European words than to the reconstructed P.I.E term*. Its grammar should be very simple too (unlike that of Esperanto with its 6 participles).
Besides, it should be very INTERNATIONAL, familiar to all Europeans, each of them finding in it, words and features SIMILAR to those of his own native language. This is only possible when one uses the common Indo-European roots which have given words in all Indo-European languages.
This is what Uropi has done : it is both a diachronic and synchronic synthesis of P.I.E and ancient and modern Indo-European languages and is is very simple and international.
The last step is to hand this common language over to European citizens so that each of them might take part in its elaboration, amend it making suggestions and criticisms, in short, take it over. I agree with you that, at this point, the comparison with modern Hebrew is relevant. There is no need to be hysterical about it : Eliezer Ben Yehuda has nothing to do with the holocaust; P.I.E has nothing to do with Hitler, all this is perfectly anachronic. Old Hebrew had long been a dead language (Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic) when Ben Yehuda revived it, and it was a success because, in addition to his enormous, remarkable work (a synthesis of old Hebrew and other Semitic languages among which Aramaic and even Arabic), he managed to convince many Jews from Palestine and from the diaspora to collaborate. One must never forget that, at the time, Yiddish, as a living language, was a very serious competitor.
* To illustrate this let me give you a few examples of NeoBlabo, a M.I.E created by Emmanuel Marcq and whose words are very close to the original P.I.E roots, together with their translation in Uropi. It‘s easy to see which language is the simpler.
EVEREM VLOM AD UHLQONES.
I perì de flor a de vulp I brought the flower to the wolf
APODEIN, PUIOMI EX KRASI TEUES, XOSTOS !
Domòr, i ve pivo od ti keb, stranior! Tomorrow, i’ll drink from your head, stranger!
ESMH ESUMENTOS TOLQONTES TOM DHNQAM.
I se felic voko di linga. I am happy to speak this language
MEIOM VREUHM EX DERUES
De miki drovipònt. The small wooden bridge.
INAGO XRE?ONTHM.
I inìz famo. I ‘m getting hungry.
KATOS EDHTH MUSHM.
De kat jed de mus. The kat eats the mouse.
MUS VUT EDHTOS DE KATIES.
De mus vidì jeden pa de kat. The mouse was eaten by the cat.
VUM GENTS EN XESLO NEUHM KHNTOM OKTOKHNTH.
I genì in desnèv sunte ocdes I was born in nineteen eighty
NATALI, TUE ENQEIO A RESTORANTES EN ALI ANTI STRATES.
Po Krisgen, i invìt ta a de restoria tragòn de strad For Christmas I invite you to the restaurant across the street
Hi, Mr. Landais!
We are indeed interested in every effort made about using the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language as a modern language within the EU.
About your ‘improvements’, I have to say clearly that we are not usually interested in such personal changes. There may be dozens of conlangers willing to share their IE-based projects with us, each of them with different phonetic-morphological-syntactical changes to be made on the PIE core (for example, without noun declension, with pronouns, with different “more western” phonetics, etc.).
However, it is that very PIE core which is interesting, as it is a scientifical reconstruction, using comparative grammar and historical linguistics, and widely accepted as being real (although, like psychological or archaeological findings, subject to strong criticism by sceptics). Knowledge and time is limited, and we don’t deem ourselves enough intelligent to ascertain what is “easier” or “better” for Europeans – we just know about a natural language, spoken some millenia ago, which may be used today with some effort.
To work seriously, with public subsidies and therefore under public and political scrutiny, criticized by professors and linguists alike, we cannot mix with personal projects like yours. We are currently trying to improve the grammar in a certain sense, namely to use a ‘purer’ PIE vocabulary, instead of loan-translated words of Graeco-Latin and English origin…
Congratulations for your work, I wish you good luck with your language, and hope to see you and the rest of IE conlangers work for a spoken Indo-European in the European Union.
Carlos Quiles, cquiles a t dnghu d o t org
Hi!
I am the inventor of the conlang “sambahsa-mundialect” which is a kind of highly modernized MIE and I can assert that Mr. Quiles is not a reincarnation of Torquemada, even if he is a Spaniard too 🙂
As for myself, I fear that MIE would be too complicated a language for a EU-wide use and I have pointed out the “overlatinization” of the vocabulary. But that did not prevent me from having some interest in MIE. Mister Quiles friendly answered my interrogations and even accepted a minor modification I had proposed.
So let’s accept each other’s differences !
As Voltaire could have told in sambahsa-mundialect:
Ne samstehmo con quo yu meinte
bet katuiem kay yu poitte sayge id!
Ph.D Olivier Simon
Keri Sr Quiles
First of all, I must say that I have always been fascinated by PIE and all the work achie-ved by linguists for over 2 centuries in order to reconstruct it. This is why is was very in-terested in your website.
But let’s be practical. In addition to working on Uropi, I also happen to be teaching lan-guages, and though « I don’t deem myself intelligent enough to ascertain what is “easier†or “better†for Europeans », to take up your own words, I certainly know what difficulties my students have to master a foreign language like English (considered as being easy), not to mention Russian, German or even Spanish (which most French people regard as being easier).
In addition, you only have to spend some time on a Greek beach (or a Spanish one if you prefer – incidentally mi mujer es Andaluza ) to be appalled at the standard of linguistic exchanges in « English? » between average citizens of Europe.
PIE, in its original form, with all its grammatical complexity, could only be learnt by a handful of specialists in their ivory towers (whatever their University qualifications might be); it could never be learnt by the peoples of Europe even with some effort as you say (or with enormous ones). So how could it become the common language of the EU ?
My second remark is that PIE, however well reconstructed, will remain a pre-historic language, and you will have to make up more than half its vocabulary. In a recent comparison I made on a corpus of 700 words between Uropi, Dutch, English, Sanskrit, Hindi, Fârsi, Arabic and Indonesian, 70% of Uropi words (modern terms) simply had no equivalent in Sanskrit.
Then, what will you do, if you reject the use of any loan words whether they come from Greek or Latin, English or Arabic, Nahuatl or Arawak ? How will you tran-slate hotel, taxi, menu ,computer, chocolate, tomato, potato, to write (« scribere ») school, theatre, etc…, which are already international words used in all European languages, not to say throughout the world.
Here again, the comparison with modern Hebrew is relevant: the bulk of Ben Yehuda’s work was not to revive old Hebrew but to create « modern terms », to the great horror of traditional Jews for whom Hebrew had to remain a sacred tongue. And he never hesitated to borrow words from other languages; this is what natural languages have always done.
In Uropi, there are no « improvements » or « personal changes » as you say. Uropi is a very democratic language : most of the time the majority wins. Maybe I didn’t make myself sufficiently clear. Let me give you a few examples from the Uropi Etymolo-gical Dictionary :
gov = ox
(I-E gwous* = ox > Skr gáus = ox > Hin gây, Tzig guruv ( Pers gâv = cow, o-Arm kov = cow, m-Arm gov, Gr βους “bous†= ox, cow, Lat bos/bovis = ox > It bue, Sp buey, Port boi, Rum bou , Fr boeuf = ox, o-Ir bó, Gael. bó, Wel buwch, Bret buc’h = cow, o-Ice ky’r, ohG chuo, Ags cû = cow > Eng cow, Ge Kuh, Du koe, Swe, Da ko, Nor ku, Latv govs = cow, Lit gaujà = herd, oSl. govêdo = bovine > Rus [goviadina], SrCr govedina = beef, govedo = bovine, govedar = cattleman, Cz hovêzà = ox-, TochA ko, Toch B keu = cow
Here the Armenian or Latvian words have been chosen as they correspond more or less to the arithmetical average of the afore-mentioned words.
ito = to go
(I-E ei-*, ei-dh-*, i-ta-* = to go, Skr êmi, êti, imáh, yánti = to go, Zend aêiti, yeinti, vpers aitiy = he goes, Gr ειμι “eimi†= I’ll go, Lat eo = I go, it, ite he goes, you go, Sp ir = to go, iré = I’ll go, Fr. irai, iras, etc…, Got iddja = I went, o. Prus êit = he goes, Lit eiti = to go, Latv iêt, oSl iti, Rus [itti] = to go, SrCr ic’i, Cz jÃti, Pol. isc’, Toch B yam = he goes, Hit i-it = go! o-Ir ethaid = he goes, Lat itio = going, iter/itineris = way (= Toch A ytar, Hit i-tar), Gr ιθμα (ithma) = walk)
= Slavic terms (old Slavonic and Russian) + Latin (it, ite)
ka = what?
(I-E kwo-*, kwe-*, kwâ-*, kwei-*, kwu-* = interrogatives, SEE kan, ke, ko, kim, kel
Skr káh, ka = who?, kâ = how?, Gr τις “tis†= who, what?, Alb kë = who? (object), çë = what?, Lat quid = what?, It che = what?, Sp qué = what?, Rum ce = what?, o-Ir cid = what? > Gael cad = what?, cé = who? Got hva = what?, Ags. hwæt = what? ohG. hwaz = what? > Ge was = que, what?, Eng what, Du wat = what?, Da. hvad = what, Swe vad = what?, oPrus. kas, ka = who?, Lit kás = who, what?, Latv kas = who?, what? oSl c’-to = what?, Rus [chto] = what?, Pol co = what?, Cz co = what?, SrCr ^sta, ^sto = what?,
Toch A kus = what? )
= Sanskrit & Baltic (Lithuanian & Latvian)
luc = light
(I-E leukos*, loukis*, louks* = light, louksnâ* = moon, SEE luns, lun > Skr rocÃs, Zend raocah- = light, Arm lois = light, lusin = moon, Gr λευκος “leukos†= white, λυχνος “lukhnos†= lamp, lantern, Lat lux, lumen = light, luceo = to light, shine, luna = moon > It luce, luna, Sp luz, luna, Port luz, lua, Rum luminä, lunä , Fr. lumière, lune = light, moon, m.Ir. luan = light, moon, Gael léas = ray, beam, loinnir = light, brilliance, Wel llug = gleam, brightness, lluched, Bret luc’hedenn = lightning, luc’h, luc’hañ = to gleam, Wel lloer, Bret loar = moon, Got liuhath, Ge Licht, Du licht, Eng light, Da lys, Swe ljus, oSl luc’, oBul. luc’a, Rus [loutchâ€] = ray, beam, Sloven lúc^ = light, SrCr luc^, luc^a = ray, beam, o.Bul luna, Rus [loona] = moon, Hit. luk(k)- = to gleam, tolight up)
= Italian and Slovenian
mar = sea
(I-E mori* = sea > perhaps Skr maryáda = frontier, limit, (seaside?), marús = sand desert, Lat mare > It mare, Rum mare, Sp mar, Port mar, Fr mer, Tzig muárja, o-Ir muir, Gael muir, Wel mor, Cor, Bret mor, Got marei, o-Ice marr (+lake), As meri, Ags mere (+ lake, pond), ohG mari, Ge Meer, Du meer (lac), Eng mere, oSl morje = sea, Rus [more], SrCr more, Pol morze, Cz mor’e, o.Prus mary = gulf, bay, Lit mãrios = sea )
= Spanish and Portuguese
pod = foot
(I-E pôts* = foot > Skr pât, pâdam, Zend pad- = foot, Arm ot-kh = feet, Alb posh = beneath, at the foot of, Gr πως, ποδος “pôs, podosâ€, Lat pes, pedis > It piede, Sp pie, Port pé, Rum picior, Fr pied, Got fotus, o-Ice fotr, ohG fuoz > Ge Fuß, Eng foot, Du voet, Da fod, Swe, Nor fot, Latv pêda, Lit péda = foot, péscias, oSl pés’- > Rus [peshkom], Cz pês’ky, SrCr pes^ice, Pol pieszo = on foot, Rus [pechekhod], Cz pês’ák, SrCr pes^ak, Pol pieszy = pedestrian, TochA pe, TochB paiyye, Hit pata- = foot)
= Greek
nom = name
(I-E en(o)mn*, nomn* = name, Skr nâma, Hin nâm, Zend nâma, Tzig anáv, Arm anoun, Alb emër, Gr ονομα “onomaâ€, Lat nomen, It nome, Sp nombre, Rum nume, o-Ir ainmm, Wel enw, Bret ano, Got namo, o-Ice nafn, Ge Name, Eng. name, Du naam, Da navn, Swe namn, oPrus emnes, oSl ime, SrCr. ime, Rus [imia], Cz jméno, Pol imie,, Toch A ñem, Toch B ñom)
= French and Italian
sedo = to sit
(I-E sed-*, sêd-* = to sit = Skr sad-, Zend had-, Skr sidati, Zend hi∂aiti = he’s sitting, Skr sádas = seat, Arm. nstim = I’m sitting, Gr εζομαι “hezomai†= to sit, εδος “hedosâ€, εδÏα “hedra†= seat = Lat sedes, sedere = It sedere = to sit, Sp, Port sentarse, Rum a se as,eza = to sit down, o-Ir sa(i)did = he’s sitting, Wel sedd = seat, seddu = to sit, Bret azezañ = to sit down, sez = seat, o-Ice sit, as sittiu, ohG sizzu = I’m sitting, Ge sitzen, Eng to sit, Du zitten, Da sidde, Swe sitta, Lit. sédëti, Latv sêdêt, oSl sêdêti, Rus [sidiet’], Pol siedziec’, SrCr sjediti, Cz sedêti = to sit)
= Latin & Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian & Serbian
taur = bull
(I-E tauros* = bull > Gr ταυÏος “taurosâ€, Alb tarok, Lat taurus > It toro, Sp toro, Port touro, Rum taur, Fr taureau, Gaul tarvos, o-Ir tarb, Gael tarbh, Wel tarw, Bret tarv, o-Ice thjórr, Got stiur = young bull, ohG stior > Ge Stier, Du stier = bull, Da, Nor tyr, Swe tjur, o.Prus tauris = bison, Lit tauras, oSl tur- = aurochs > Rus [tourâ€], Pol tur = aurochs, Cz tur = ox)
= Rumanian
vod = water
(I-E wódr-*, wedôr*, Gén. udnés* = water > Skr udaká-m, plur udá = water, Zend vaidi- = stream, ao∂a = wave, Arm get = river, Gr â€˜Ï…Î´Ï‰Ï â€œhudôrâ€, Alb ujë = water, Lat unda = wave > It onda = wave, Fr onde = Sp, Port onda, SEE voln; o-Irl u(i)sce, Gael uisce = water, Got wato, o-Ice vatn, ohG wazzar, as watar, Ags wæter > Ge Wasser, Eng, Du water, Swe vatten, Da vand, Nor vann = water, o.Prus wundan, unds, Lit vanduõ, Latv udens = water, oSl voda, Rus [voda], SrCr, Cz voda, Pol woda, Hit wâtar = water, Toch.A wär, Toch.B war = water)
= panslavic
But the best argument in favour of Uropi is that any European (or Indo-European speaker), when he reads a Uropi sentence for the first time can understand between a third and over half of it immediately without having heard of Uropi before.
For ex:
Mi mata sedì ude de drev
Nekun moz ito gon li volad
Viz tu di dor ?
Ken vizì i ? Mi pater
Ka ven tu deto zi ? he pragì mo
Stajo ki ta, Pater
I avì lasen ta ki ti mata, ti frate id sestas.
= Extracts from the Uropi translation of a Rom (Gipsy) short story : « E pasledno vudar » (the Last Door)
One of my correspondents learnt Uropi by himself in less than a year, and is at present (i-e in his 2nd year) translating a novel from Spanish into Uropi (he has already translated 4 chapters).
As for the « western » approach, let me tell you that we received several thousand letters of support from Russia and the former « Soviet » republics (e.g Lithuania, Latvia, Tadjikistan, etc…), which I wouldn’t dare call « western », but of course, East and West are very relative notions.
Sorry for having been too long, but certain points definitely had to be cleared up.
Bis bald
JL
PS I hate the word « conlang ». For French people « con » is an insult (CF Spanish: coño), and conlang sounds like the language of bloody fools.
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Hi again!
We have moved your interesting messages to the forum, so that everyone might read the messages and don’t repeat your questions and ideas.
Thank you.
btw., we’ll close the possibility of answering to old reports, so that no more spam is sent to it.