Open letter to the Indo-European Language Revival Association members, friends and supporters

Dear members, friends and supporters of Dnghu,

We are aware that we have neglected many of you over the last months. This letter is part of our attempt to put this right, informing you of the latest events.

After a long time of dealing with our professional issues, which have completely absorbed our time, partly due to the economic crisis, partly due to some special career compromises, we are already planning to resume work where we left it, beginning in march 2011.

During the last 10 months of standstill, some of you have proposed changes to our texts, or questioned reconstruction issues, while others have suggested improvements to the project’s short- and long-term aims; some did also help us solve common (spam or technical) problems in our websites.

Even though we didn’t answer ANY of you due to the lack of time, please be assured that we did (and do) read your mails and comments, and that we thank you very much for your support, proposals, and criticism. If you really needed a specific answer, please do not hesitate to resend your question after we have renewed the work on Dnghu.

Some members (and board members) have changed works, or have moved, or have been working harder due to the crisis and its effects on personal and family finances, and this has led to the long break.

However, due to the free and public nature of our works, our lack of activity hasn’t prevented many of you from downloading and buying the books, studying the language, and trying to speak it. You are thus helping create a more prepared community for the beginning of the (spoken) IE revival; we are aware of these facts, too, and that gives us another strong reason to renew our efforts as soon as possible.

I myself have been quite busy with practices in some hospital services during my last year at medical school, and for some months already I have been preparing myself for the State Exam for Medical Residents (the so-called “MIR”) in Spain. After taking the exam, I hope to have at least 3 free months before the beginning of hospital work, and I expect to dedicate some of that free time to the project.

Among the most pressing matters, there are some needed corrections and improvements to the Grammar (especially the Syntax) and vocabulary, some additional text translations into MIE, a learning method (Assimil– or Teach Yourself-like), and the long-awaited (and long-requested, by the way) podcasts, or at least some audios to help speakers with IE pronunciation.

As you probably understand, this is a project that began as an economic-revivalist one in 2006 – a theoretical proposal of one language for the EU for practical reasons, shared within the University, which got the attention and recognition of its leading members, and which should have been taken over afterwards – according to the initial plan – by its Faculty of Arts, with research projects on linguistics.

Dnghu has instead gradually become a mainly private, linguistic-revivalist project (with the Association as the accompanying ‘social’ branch of the language revival), which has also changed its “EU-only” initial vision, and in which the linguistic work is now the leading question, that needed (and needs) to be carefully discussed and reviewed by some of us with no direct contact between us, and who have other interests and careers in the daily world…

Thank you for your patience and support,

Best regards,

Carlos Quiles