The Indo-European (IE) revivalists are up to some crazy plans to get the European Union to adopt "Modern Indo-European" (MIE) as the new European lingua franca. One look at the grammar that they propose and you'll see why their efforts are more doomed than
Esperanto[1]:
http://dnghu.org/Indo-European/
They seem to have some interesting re-interpretations of history and IE roots in
their pdf too, so I would suggest that after reading it, consult another source of information or hug your local librarian. Remember, question everything.
One of the things that I noticed was the claim that
*ec- means 'fast'. First off, the standard spelling you see in any textbook on IE is palatal
*ḱ. More importantly however, the root isn't directly based on the attested words which show Greek
ōkus, Latin
accipiter 'hawk' <
*h₁oḱu-petro- and Sanskrit
āṣu-. The word is normally shown as
*h₁ōḱú- but the initial
*h₁ is often omitted for simplicity's sake (read
here).
These revivalists also linger on theories that place the earliest Indo-European far more to the east, near the Ural mountains! I personally have some major issues with that considering that if this were true, there would be an abundance of
Uralic loans in Indo-European, however nothing conclusive has ever been shown earlier than 2500 BCE when the
Indo-Iranian branch of IE was in
positive contact with the
Finno-Ugric branch of Uralic that had only done so, so it appears, because it had journeyed further south near the Caspian Sea from its original forested areas to the north. The few links that have been identified between the earlier protolanguages IE and Uralic themselves, such as IE
*wódr̥ 'water' / Ur
*weti 'water', could equally have been inherited in both protolanguages from a common parent language in the remote recesses of prehistory. Plus, the age old dilemma of Indo-European
*septm̥ "seven" as a transparent borrowing from Proto-Semitic
*sabʕ-at-um 'seven' (masc. form) (basic root
*sabʕ-) is something that can't be ignored. So logically, the easterly location just isn't plausible. (On the other hand, I'm not a fan of those who place Indo-European in Turkey either. Eastern Europe suffices if we take into full account the implications of Neolithic sea trade in the Mediterranean
to which archaeology attests.)
The
original grammar of Indo-European is explained in great detail by Piotr Gasiorowski for those traditionalists out there like myself who don't like to mix protolanguages with protopolitics.
UPDATES
(2009 Nov 2) Added footnote #1. Also see
dnghu and dogmatic relativism for an update on Carlos Quiles' "organization".
NOTES
[1] I should have qualified this statement a long while ago to avoid confusion. What I mean here is "doomed" in the sense of expecting that Esperanto or any other similar language attain the same popularity as other
natural languages. Afterall popularity is the name of the game here, isn't it? There's no point marketing an unpopularizable language obviously. Of course, "never say never" and all that, but for everyone's information, Mandarin is estimated to have a little more than a billion speakers in all. I have respect for Esperanto as a fun
conlang only and nonetheless appreciate the positive message of global unity that comes with it, but popularizing an artificial language for anything more than entertainment or for an apolitical, humanist message of peace is unconstructive.
