Modern Indo-European learning course (Alpha), Pokorny’s Etymological Dictionary and PIE dictionary-translator

As promised, these are the newest developments of the Dnghu Association:

  • The ‘experimental’ sketch for the first (self-)learning course of Modern Indo-European, by Mario Basile, has been published. While still in Alpha (very unstable) version, it is intended to promote and allow for collaboration on a learning course with an Assimil-like format. It will eventually be recorded in audio format, when the official, stable version is published. Such a date is therefore dependent on the collaboration, i.e. additions and corrections, that we receive from readers.
  • We have updated Fernando López-Menchero’s Proto-Indo-European lexicon of the Indo-European grammar, version 5.0, releasing the files in PDF formats and revising the data from the automatic dictionary-translator, which is now also available in Latin (for precision of the English meaning) and in German, which contains machine translations of the original English words.
  • After some complaints about the corrupted nature of our published version of Pokorny’s Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (due to the addition of doubtful etymologies and cognates), we have taken the original document and processed it for the automatic dictionary-translator software. It is now available as the original German and the translated English versions.
  • We have also added Pokorny’s dictionary of Proto-Indo-European roots as WebHelp files for online reference in the original German and in the translated English versions.
  • Share and Like buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social networks and sharing websites have been added to all websites. Even though some of the websites where the buttons appear won’t be interesting to share, for the moment this automatic addition is the easiest and quickest way to add that functionality to the whole website.
  • We will probably (temporarily) close the Indo-European languages portal Wiki (as well as the other Wikis in the different languages) for edition, leaving it as is (waiting for future uses), given that only a few people have shown interest in working on it, and that it is constantly being attacked by spam bots and spammers.

Your Indo-European language team.

4 thoughts on “Modern Indo-European learning course (Alpha), Pokorny’s Etymological Dictionary and PIE dictionary-translator

  • Can’t wait for pronunciation. It’s hard to imagine how “Wl-” and other clusters are pronounced as is, or what expectations there are for pronunciation (e.g. if I say “bos” instead of “bhos” will I be diverging too far from the standard? How does one pragmatically pronounce certain consontant clusters? etc).

    Good job guys.

  • @Chrissomerry: Thank you for your comment.

    I guess pragmatic pronunciation would be fine, like speaking with foreign accent in any other language. Or, if kept as the standard, it would be like the current pronunciation of Modern Hebrew, related to Hebrew’s (supposed) actual, old pronunciation.

    I am waiting to see more work done by others in the learning course of Mario, and the publication of Fernando’s basic syntax. I think the future of this project is there, while audio and text translations are just a PR kind of thing.

    Some people have been ‘adapting’ our works for years for their personal conlangs based on PIE – which I find O.K. -, and doing a lot of translations and audios, and (as with any other, previous conlangs) it just (most probably) won’t work. We want the most correct reconstruction, to be able to use an almost natural (hence ‘most guaranteed’) reconstructed language. If we had worked with texts and audios using our grammar and dictionary of 2006 (inflection more influenced by the IE Spanish school, vocabulary more oriented toward Latin and Germanic, etc.), they wouldn’t be of much use today…

    If we get some interesting work on these important aspects from third parties, I won’t mind recording some example podcasts myself in the near future. Proto-Indo-European pronunciation shouldn’t be much different from Assimil’s Ancient Greek audio; you can listen to some examples of the reconstructed pronunciation (with pitch accent) in http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agp/ , or http://arts.anu.edu.au/linguistics/People/AveryAndrews/Homer/ (although these audios contain recitations mainly). For aspirated voiced sounds, Hindi or Urdu will do the trick; listen e.g. to a recitation from the Rig Veda (first and last Sukta): http://sanskrit.safire.com/Audio.html

    As a personal quest for the correct (reconstructed) pronunciation, if you change Ancient Greek aspirated voiceless for Indo-Aryan aspirated voiced (e.g. from Sanskrit or Hindi), you have everything you need to pronounce PIE. I don’t really think pronunciation is an essential aspect for us to concentrate on right now; we can use our limited time in other needs that have less straightforward solutions.

  • Sellamat !

    @Chris : In PIE, the difference between “bhos” and “bos” is not very important insofar *b nearly never appeared (it must have been *p + *H3). For occlusives like *gh vs *g, *dh vs *d, it was very important.

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