Esperanto & other invented languages vs. Indo-European for Europe (and IV): Universal Law of Persistence of Error
May 11, 2008 by 
Indo-European
A recent comment on the post about the so-called Grin Report - which explained the benefits of having one common language for Europe -, gives (unintentionally, I guess) still more reasons to support a natural language like Proto-Indo-European over Esperanto and similar inventions:
Le meilleur est l’ennemi du bien, ‘The best is the enemy of the good’; Ever since Ido tried to ‘improve’ on Esperanto, many other constructed languages have come along, but none has achieved anything near to what Esperanto has accomplished
I agree. No artificial (’constructed’) language has achieved what Esperanto has, and no conlang is “better” than Esperanto, because “better” in conlangs is indeed enemy of “good”, as it happens partly in social networks, both ’systems’ (to call the thousand Esperantos something) based on concepts of “popularity ranking” and supposed “number of followers/supporters”: the more popular your system is, the more attention you will be able to attract - no matter how stupid it might be from a logical point of view, it is all a question of ‘relevance’…
In Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, on the other hand, “better” is indeed better than “good”, as a better reconstruction brings the language we want to speak nearer to how it was actually spoken 4.500 years ago by Proto-Indo-Europeans.
The difference between them, to put it easy, is that some of you might say “we are going to call the sun ’suno’ in Esperanto”, while others could say “we are going to call the sun ’soleil’ in Ido”, and so on and on, for ever and ever. The sun had only one name (maybe two) in Proto-Indo-European, and most (old) dialects show its derived term; but they might also show derivations from different original variants, or the original form might be still obscure. That’s why we need to improve our knowledge in Indo-European dialects and Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, just in case we need to replace the (now) common PIE reconstructed *sāwel with a different root, say *sōwl, or a source near to Gmc. zero-grade *sulnos, etc., because of a different Vedic Sanskrit or Tocharian attested word… In any case, we are saying “sun” as Proto-Indo-Europeans did, but it might be more correct to use a variant deemed nearer to the original PIE language, instead of what we use today. Therefore, better is better than good; but just good is also all right in PIE reconstruction for a modern Indo-European language of Europe.
I guess one has to undergo some kind of difficult abstraction to understand this, as many Esperantists don’t seem to get the point: maybe they aren’t always opened to stop speaking (or, better, stop defending) their ‘language’, while at the same time trying others to begin learning it. I can understand the Esperantist reticence to dismiss their wrongly-directed past efforts and hopes, but the time and work already wasted learning or supporting Esperanto won’t be recovered. They still have, though, the opportunity to make good use of their time and wish of a common language for Europe in the future: they only have to take the right decision, not taking on account past mistakes.
there are more than 30,000 book titles in Esperanto! And Esperanto has been around for more than 120 years! Most of the other attempts at a constructed language have fallen by the wayside.
I agree too. Every single conlang apart from Esperanto has failed. And I should add Esperanto has obviously failed as an international language, as you cannot seriously call “international” a ‘language’ that is spoken by some dozens of people in an ‘International Esperanto Convention’ once a year… I am sure more people are able to speak ‘languages’ like Sindarin or Klingon in a regional Lord of the Rings or Star Trek convention anywhere in the world, than Esperantists actually do speak Esperanto in their yearly ‘International Conventions’.
Anyway, entering in your “great numbers” argument, if that code called Esperanto was created in some hours by an illuminated ophtalmologist a 120 years ago, I don’t see how it can compete with a natural language like Proto-Indo-European, derived from an older prehistoric language, spoken for centuries, older than the oldest civilizations of Europe, derived into a thousand dialects still spoken today, and which has been studied and its reconstruction improved by expert linguists for more than 200 years.
To compare ‘number of book titles’, please do a quick search with Google and Google Scholar to see how many scientific research papers and books have been written about Proto-Indo-European, and how many centres and universities have professors teaching Proto-Indo-European to thousands of students each year, and then we can compare the same numbers about your inventions - you can even compare it with the whole number of papers and books which deal with all conlangs, not only Esperanto, if you want…
Also, if Esperanto is (in your words) the most successful conlang in history, and if, after 120 years of being such a great success, there are only (supposedly) 30.000 book titles - you can see I accept your inflated numbers, I don’t care anymore about veracity in Esperantist inventions, it would be a total nonsense to drive the discussion to your imaginary world of ‘facts’ about your ‘language’ - and (supposedly) some thousands of speakers in the world - while Proto-Indo-European, whose revival as a spoken language hasn’t been proposed until two years ago, has already more publications and actual speakers, most of them expert linguistis and philologists.
So I don’t get your point on the advantages of learning Esperanto at all: maybe you Esperantists are still working on a ‘language’ that only you Esperantists want to learn to be able to speak with each other only, like some kind of a secret, super-dooper code only you understand - but, indeed, so easy that you cannot expect to speak without being understood by others… If so, maybe it’s time for some of you practical Europeans to get rid of this ‘art’ called conlanging, if your aim is really to speak a common European (or even international) language, and begin thinking about learning and speaking a common, natural language like Proto-Indo-European, that cannot be “substituted” by other ‘language’ inventions, however ‘better’ or ‘easier’ they might be considered by their fans…
A similar fate awaits Indo-European, which, in its attempt to be more “naturalistic,” has actually become more difficult to learn, with its four conjugations of the verb, for example.
First of all, we never said it is easy, as, in fact, Indo-European is far more difficult than Esperanto and other wrongly-called ‘languages’ formed by simple invented rules+vocabulary, you are right - my nephew says “pa” and “ma” when she wants something: English is more difficult than her ‘language’, so should I write my post in it, and create a group to promote it, only because she and other kids think a “ma & pa” language code is enough to be called ‘language’ and to communicate everything they want to others…?
Following your argument, I have to say Indo-European could probably be considered more difficult than other real, natural languages like English or French. However, you miss two very important points, showing you - like many Esperantists which repeat such perennial equivocal arguments until exhaustion - strive to see the project as “just another Esperanto”, thus perpetuating your mistakes and misconceptions about language and peoples, and possibly the mistakes and misconceptions of others who might read your ‘reasons’:
1) There is no such “attempt to be more naturalistic“: Proto-Indo-European was a natural, spoken language, and it evolved into different dialects, which are the ancestors of modern Indo-European languages. We want to revive an old language, not to create a conlang; to put it easy for you again, we want to speak a real language, not to decide how we will call the sun, or how we will say sentences like “excuse me, can you speak Esperanto?”, that is, if we will prefer “escuso mi, cano tu spik Esperanto?” or an ‘easier’ or ‘better’ (?!) “pardoni me, poti ju parlo Esperanto?“, discussing which one of the thousand possible combinations of sounds is “easier”, or “more beautiful”, or “better”, or (to sum up) which one sounds less stupid for the future learner…
2) The fact that one language is considered ‘more difficult’ than other is in no way an obstacle to speak a language: that’s an important point you Esperantists miss the whole time, ever since the creation of your artificial monster. People began to speak Hebrew again - a modern version of the old, death language called Hebrew - because they wanted, even though your Polish idol was already promoting the “easy Esperanto” as the international language of the future at that very time. People throughout the world have said a big NO to seriously speaking absurd inventions like Volapük or Esperanto in the past 120 years because that’s people’s will. And people will decide if and when they want to speak Indo-European, no matter how “easy” or “difficult” it might be for them or for you.
The difference between Esperantists and Indo-Europeanists, I guess, is that you can spend your time learning how the grandmother of most modern languages was (and mother of some Classical languages, like Sanskrit, Latin or Greek), trying to speak nearly as Proto-Indo-Europeans spoke, waiting to see if the Indo-European language revival has success in the European Union - and knowing that, if it doesn’t succeed, you will still be far better of for learning any modern Indo-European language -; or you can get stuck in your wrong ideas about your ‘party’ or ‘group’ being “right” in trying to speak the ‘best language in the world’ or ‘the easiest language‘, learning a mix of grammatical rules + words that one man or a group of people have imagined they can call ‘language’…
But don’t be afraid, these reasons won’t convince most of you Esperantists and ambitious IAL-conlangs searchers; most of you will keep insisting in speaking your successful creations, that’s normal and people will always have a reason to speak Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Latino sine flexione, and any other ‘historical’ self-made one-minute crap they can find or create: This is a) partly due to Zamenhof’s sad marketing success in convincing other people to call his creation a “language”, and b) partly due to the fact that people necessarily follow the Universal Law of Persistence of Error, and no matter how absurd their old positions might reveal themselves after some time, there will always be a reason to follow the mistaken idea, because of e.g. ‘history’, ‘tradition’, ‘proud’, ‘group pressure’, etc. or the uttermost direct and voluntary ignorance.
If this Universal Law happened and happens with the latest and best peer-reviewed scientifical papers, and I see it everyday in the newest editions of important books on Biochemistry or Physiology, what can we expect from those who share an extravagant idea - the splendid ‘conlanging aiming to achieve the “perfect IAL”‘ idea - which is for Linguistics, if compared to Medicine, like a bad version of homeopathy…?
Posted in Conlang, Dnghu, English, Esperanto, Europaio, European Union, Indo-European language, Language alternatives, Proto-Indo-European | 
May 11th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
[...] hard criticism against Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, etc. answering a comment from a Esperantist in a post about the Grin Report’s support for [...]
May 15th, 2008 at 12:23 am
I have read your posting “Esperanto & other invented languages vs. Indo-European for Europe (and IV): Universal Law of Persistence of Error.” Since there was no place for a reply there, I shall submit a reply here.
You quibble about the difference between Esperanto as a “constructed” language and Indo-European as a “reconstructed” language. But you go on to say that you have only a tentative word now for “sun” and may have to replace it “because of a different Vedic Sanskrit or Tocharian attested word.” Why would anyone want to learn a language where the words may be constantly changing?
You say that your language, Indo-European, is the one spoken 4,500 years ago. How do you know that your version of this language is what was actually spoken then, if you also say (above) that you are not sure what the word for “sun” was? And why pick 4,500 years ago? Wasn’t Indo-European spoken before then, as some believe, or even later, as others believe? How do you pick an arbitrary date?
You belittle the figure of 30,000 book titles in Esperanto. This is the approximate number of titles of an Esperanto library in London. It consists of both translations (such as that of the Polish epic “Pan Tadeusz”) and original works. Your reference to the number of book titles of Proto Indo-European on Google refers to scholarly books ABOUT the language not IN the language. Moreover, you can go to a Vikipedia in Esperanto (a version of Wikipedia) and find thousands of articles written IN Esperanto. Esperanto is the 15th most popular language on this site, out of some 6,000(?)languages in the world.
You admit that Esperanto is much easier to learn than Indo-European and claim that this is not important. I disagree. I learned Esperanto at age 12 and had a good command of that language within a few months. But it took me 4 years or more to attain some degree of proficiency in French and later Polish, and I am still struggling with Latin and Russian.
I commend you and others for the work being done in Proto Indo-European, as I have an interest in this field. But don’t deceive yourself that you are able to “reconstruct” Indo-European as a spoken or written language. The best we can hope for is to come up with probable formulas for the words, pronunciation and grammar of this language. A tale “written” in this language by one of the scholars has since been “improved upon” amsny times, as new knowledge has been acquired. It is just as impossible to reconstruct classical Latin from French, Italian, Spanish, etc. We know Latin only from written books and documents (and are still not certain of its pronunciation). But there are NO written books or documents IN Indo-European!
I sincerely hope that the “Universal Law of Persistence of Error” does not mean you will continue to think you can “revive” Indo-European as a spoken language.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:16 am
First of all, thank you for your comments and your real interest in discussing the ideas behind this all. I thought you were one of those Esperantists who just repeat their cliches, and leave afterwards; that’s why I ‘attacked’ instead of ‘defend’, so to speak.
1) Difference between a “constructed” and a “reconstructed” language: You say “Why would anyone want to learn a language where the words may be constantly changing?” I didn’t say they are constantly changin, I say they might change…just as they change in a natural language, by the way. But I’ll answer you with another question: Why should anyone want to say “suno” because one man DECIDED it (and all the words and rules), instead of reconstructed “sāwel” (and all the reconstructed words and rules), because of the sound laws already studied from dialectal attested words like Lat. sōl, Lith. saulė, Ltv. saule, Welsh haul, Gk. ἥλιος (hēlios), Eng. sigel/—; sunne/sun, OCS slunice, Goth. sauil, Welsh haul, Ir. súil/súil, Toch. swāñce/swāñco, etc.? Or, generalizing the question, why would anyone substitute his/her natural language (even a ‘historical’ one, like say Hebrew for jews a hundred years ago or Indo-European for us Indo-European speakers) for a code invented by one man? For popularity? For ease of use? I don’t know anyone having changed his/her mother tongue for an easier language; I know, however, people who have revived languages because of history, tradition, culture, pragmatism,etc., or a combination of those factors.
2)”How do you know that your version of this language is what was actually spoken then? And why pick 4,500 years ago?” - We are trying to speak Indo-European as it was just before the European dialects split up; that means there were already no laryngeals, some syntax innovations, etc. When we say “Indo-European” we refer to THAT language, as when people say Greek they usually refer to Ancient Greek, nobody would say “hey, do you mean Greek in 500 BC, in 800 BC, in 1200 BC…? We don’t know if it was spoken from 3.000-2.000, or from 2.700-2.200, etc. as we cannot say from when exactly was Spanish spoken. We only know that after some time (probably after ca. 2000 BC) IE dialects of Europe had split up: before that date (I say ca. 2.500 to put a year), a common Indo-European, ancestor of European or Northern dialects, must have been spoken.
3) “scholarly books ABOUT the language not IN the language” That’s true. I misunderstood your assertion. The point was that Esperanto had been invented in some days, while thousands of papers of hundreds of scholars during hundreds of years had been dedicated to Proto-Indo-European reconstruction… Anyway, Esperanto has 30.000 titles in a 120 years’ history; PIE revival was proposed by us (6 people in Spain) 2 years ago. Give us a chance, you impatient Esperantists!
4) “I learned Esperanto at age 12 and had a good command of that language within a few months” - Please don’t make me repeat the example of my 2-year-old nephew using her “pa & ma” language
5)”But don’t deceive yourself that you are able to ‘reconstruct’ Indo-European as a spoken or written language. The best we can hope for is to come up with probable formulas for the words, pronunciation and grammar of this language.” OK. We didn’t say otherwise. The point was, and is still, that Indo-European was a natural language, that we can reconstruct it - with more or less certainty, depending on how you want to see it, if defending Esperanto, or English, etc. against PIE; OR from an objective point of view, accepting the pros and contras -, and that the thousand Esperantos are just personal experiments, which have nothing to do with language and linguistics. To criticize PIE and its reconstruction doesn’t make Esperanto better, or help consider it less a personal experiment and more a language, or makes it more serious than Klingon or Quenya.
6) “I sincerely hope that the ‘Universal Law of Persistence of Error’ does not mean you will continue to think you can ‘revive’ Indo-European as a spoken language”. I don’t get that point: Esperanto and the thousand different one-person codes you can find written in Wikipedias and the like websites have been there for more than a century without real success; but, after 2 years of having proposed (regionally!) our language revival, we are following a persistent error? really?
Well, given that, in fact, partly reconstructed languages like Modern Hebrew or Cornish - i.e. death languages reconstructed based on “probable formulas for the words, pronunciation and grammar of the [original] language”, as you put it when talking about PIE - have had success in the same time as Esperanto and every other experimental code has failed, I would say facts clearly support our position. Anyway, if you - like many others - would like to make this a question of opinion instead of facts, then discussion is absurd.
Sorry to be ‘attacking’ again, but - following my homeopathic example above - this all seems to me like a homeopath saying others that Surgery is an inexact, inefficient science, that we haven’t enough knowledge of the human body, etc. etc. to be really able to heal people healing it without damaging their tissues at the same time, and so on - which might all be the best rational critics possible, I don’t doubt that -; but defending, at the same time, the use of his homeopathic ’science’ (based on the belief that water can “remember” having been in contact with medicines) to heal those very same people he doesn’t want to see healed through surgery… I guess THAT could be considered a completely lack of logic, even though (a) to criticize Surgery and (b) to defend Homeopathy might be, if separately considered, somehow ‘logical’ positions - or, at least, “common” or “normal” thoughts (maybe better described as “fears” or “ignorance”) some groups of people share.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
How do you say “Can I smoke here?” in Proto-Indo-European?In Esperanto it would be “Chu mi povas fumi chi-tie?” Where can I find examples like this in PIE if I wanted to learn this reconstructed “language”?
Why do you compare the proposed resurrection of PIE as a modern language with the recent resurrection of Hebrew as a modern language? They are not alike. Hebrew, like Latin, had long continued as a liturgical language after it ceased to be used as a daily language. Both Hebrew and Latin can be found in written documents. So modern Hebrew is not a “reconstructed” language but rather and “updated” language, just as Latin can be “updated” to include words for modern ideas like “airplane,” “television,” etc. PIE was never written, so how can you update it?
What is the difference between using “suno” in Esperanto for “sun” or “sawel” in PIE for “sun”? Why is one “better” than the other? When I was at the Esperanto Congress in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2005 there were 2,344 people from 62 countries and we could all talk to one another in Esperanto. It did not seem to me that the people from Nepal, from Togoland, from China, etc. much cared whether we used “suno” or “sawel.” And from what I have read, many Chinese are waiting to see if the European Union will adopt Esperanto as a common “second” language; in which case, the Chinese would be anxious to have more Chinese learn Esperanto so they can communicate with the EU. I don’t think the Chinese would care whether the word for “sun” was “suno” or “sawel.” Do you?
May 20th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
How did or can anyone say “Can I smoke here?” in Old Latin or Ancient Hebrew? How did they refer to the truck, or car, or motorbike, or to a spaceship? I’m sure Esperanto has words for all these modern words, say “truko” or “camiono”, “caro” or “automobilo”, “motorbiko”, and “spaconavo” or “spacioshipo”… Old Latin and Hebrew, as Proto-Indo-European, had a word for the “smoke” (i.e. vapour from burning) and its verb, and both ancient languages have used that term to build up a new one for “smoking a cigarrette”, viz. L.Lat. fumare (same as in Old Latin for the verb of vapour from burning) and Modern Hebrew ?. We also know the word for “smoke” in PIE, and the verb derived from it, so it’s not difficult to obtain it just as revived languages do obtain modern terms from old ones. By the way, smoke is reconstructed as PIE dhumos; you can yourself arrive to the same conclusion as linguists by comparing these terms, if you know some basic Indo-European phonology: Lat. fumus, Skt. dhumah, O.C.S. dymu, Lith. dumai, O.Prus. dumis, M.Ir. dumacha, Gk. thymos, etc. The question is, then, why should we modern Indo-European speakers change our millennary dialectal cognate PIE word “dhumos” (in my case from Lat. fumus, Spa. humo and fumar) for a term from ‘languages’ (say Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua or Klingon) which arbitrarily mix words from Latin or Greek or Polish or whichever original natural or imaginary language one person deemed “better” than other, selecting e.g. “fumi”, or “smuko”, or “raucho”, or “cigarreto”, or “po”, or “nang”, or “pochitipuatleoticuahalitlmon”…?
We know they are not the same; some people compare Cornish with Modern Hebrew, some others Cornish with Manx, and others compare Manx with Basque or Scottish Gaelic. They are all different language revival cases (some shouldn’t probably be considered “revival” strictu sensu), but the idea behind such comparisons of “language revival” is generally evident, even if you don’t want to see it: we want to use an old language - whether attested in some oral tales, or tablets, or scripts, or by reconstruction as PIE - to build up a partly new modern language system, as was made with Modern Hebrew, based on ancient written texts. We select Modern Hebrew to compare it with Modern Indo-European because both are based on the concept of recovering something common for a common territory (in our case the European Union), for people who share a common history and culture through language. Do you think it would be different for you Esperantists if tablets of some dialectal form of Proto-Indo-European were discovered in, say, Ukraine from 2500 BC? I guess not, you will still more or less repeat your cliches about Esperanto. Then why do you try to criticize Proto-Indo-European reconstruction and Indo-European linguistics in any possible way, instead of just supporting your great ‘language’? As I told you before, the fact that you or other Esperantists or Idoists or Quenyaists might consider PIE “not good enough as a language” or “worse than X language” doesn’t make its reconstruction less scientific, or your creations more a real language… To read your criticisms regarding PIE reconstructed terms is like reading criticisms of Basque language modern terms by some anti-Basques, who say e.g. that Bas. “ordenagailu” is an invented term, while accepting that Spa. “ordenador” (both from Fr. “ordinateur”) is a natural one, arguing the Basque language was a language of shepherds; that might be right, of course, and the same might be said of Proto-Indo-European too, but that doesn’t make “ordenagailu” in any case ‘worse’ than “ordenador” or “computer”, and such criticisms don’t make Esperanto in any possible case a real, natural language or a better option than Basque or Proto-Indo-European either… It just tries to move the attention from “Esperanto a real language?” to “X a ‘fully natural’ language?” - and I won’t repeat my example above about a Homeopath criticizing Surgery…
I think I’ve made sufficiently clear my opinion about a language being “better” or “worse”, or “easier” or “more difficult”, or “more beautiful” or “ugly”, etc. These are just opinions, like the ones you could share about (Ancient or Modern) Hebrew; I’d like to care about facts: fact, language revival might succeed, because it succeeded before; fact, language inventions haven’t ever succeeded, apart from some thousands “speaking” Klingon, Quenya/Sindarin, Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, etc. in their “International” meetings; fact, most people like the own traditions, culture, language, etc., and would accept recovering something like an ancient common language, just as French, Spanish, Italians, Portuguese or Romanians would like to see Latin as the official EU language; fact, people dislike replacing the own - not to talk about their mother tongues - for foreign things - not to talk about something like a one-man-and-two-days-of-work-invention-called-’language’-by-their-supporters; fact, the current Proto-Indo-European language reconstruction is enough to build up a modern language system for Europe, as Ancient Hebrew was enough to build up Modern Hebrew, despite of your reticence concerning Schleicher’s Fable versions - which hasn’t changed esentially in a century -; fact, Indo-European cannot be substituted by other language, as Hebrew cannot be substituted by another “better” or “easier” language, because they are both natural languages; fact, I can create in two days another ‘language’ called Esperanzu or Volapuka, deemed “better”, “easier”, “more beautiful”, etc. than any other language death or alive by some 2,000 people who will try to “speak that language” in a Esperanzu convention in Lithuania or succeed with thousands of articles in a Vikipedio Volapukas 120 years from now; and still, this “languages” could be substituted as well by other called Esperanzas, or Volapokis, or Espepuko or Volaranto, and so on for ever and ever, always with some thousands of well-minded Esperanzastists, Volapukatists, or Espervolapukantists, etc. willing to defend such “languages” everywhere for any reason, just by repeating their old aeternal (wrong) cliches like “better”, “easier”, “beautiful”, “popularity”, “number of speakers”, and so on and on for ever and ever…
Sorry, but it doesn’t seem to me that most Europeans care that much about what Nepalese or Chinese people think we should speak, either… I don’t think a lot of Spanish people care e.g. about Chinese preferring that we said “suno” instead of “sol”. Nevertheless, I think many Europeans would like to see future generations speak a common language. And I think “conlangs” (like Volapuk, Solresol, Esperanto, etc.) have had enough time to prove themselves NOT worth it for learning or supporting them for Europe, just as the other linguae francae like English, French or Latin have proven not enough “common” or “neutral” in your Esperantist etymology to be adopted by all of us. So it’s time to propose alternatives, and we found the perfect one, a common, natural language we can speak as our own, grandmother of most modern European languages. I would like to see others outside Europe understanding that the majority of speakers in the world speak an Indo-European language, and that therefore, even for the world as a whole (if you want to see the choice of an International Auxiliary Language as a ‘democratic’ option), Indo-European would be a more logical choice than any natural language, not to say about an invention no one really speaks; but, if China, or Japan, or Nepal, or Saudi Arabia, or any other country wants to use Esperanto or Ido or Interlingua or Volapuk or whatever as their official “international language”, go ahead! I’ll use it to communicate with them if necessary, it’s certainly easier than Chinese or Arabic for us Indo-European speakers, that’s for sure, as such “languages” are just selection of words from French, Latin, German, English, and other IE languages, giving them weird endings and some simple gender and syntax rules, to give them a different ‘flavour’, so that a group of people may arrive to the (wrong) conclusion that they are ‘better’ or ‘easier’ or ‘more beautiful’ than natural ones…
May 20th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Thank you for your round-about reply, which I interpret as:
1. You do NOT know how to say “Can I smoke here?” in Proto-Indo-European. Nor do you have any phrasebook of other useful sentences to begin a conversation in PIE. So how can you expect anyone to use this “language”?
2. You say “We know they are not the same” (written Old Hebrew and unwritten PIE). Yet you think that you can come up with a modern version of PIE as was done with modern Hebrew. But (above) you show that you cannot say even something as common as “Can I smoke here?” in PIE.
3. You are close to being racist when you say you found “a common, natural language we can speak as our own, grandmother of most European languages.” Does this mean that you do not consider the Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, Basques as also being Europeans? That is racist!
I have wasted enough time trying to uderstand what it is that you are trying to accomplish, other than to go on some sort of ego trip. I agree with the blog Language Hat that says your whole program is “absurd.”
Good-bye!
May 21st, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Well, we didn’t have “any phrasebook or other useful sentences to begin a conversation in Ancient Hebrew” and still Modern Hebrew was eventually spoken, and the same with Cornish, for example. You can begin taking a look at our tiny Indo-European language lessons, or with our basic Proto-Indo-European lexicon, etc. We did create the Association to defend Proto-Indo-European revival, in part to offer such “phrasebooks” for free in the future; but this is, indeed, not the priority right now, but the “politics” or “language policy” side of the project - in fact, we are spending time trying to convince people like you instead of improving such learning resources… If you are really interested in Proto-Indo-European and helping our aims, you should take a look at common scholars’ introductory books on Proto-Indo-European language and Indo-European linguistics. What we want to do is more or less what Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Jewish nationalism did proposing and supporting Hebrew revival, as the political arena is not the same in Europe now as it was a hundred years ago in Israel, not to offer you Esperantists “phrasebooks to compare how ‘good’ or ‘easy’ Modern Indo-European is”, because I’m sure you’ll consider it in any case “too difficult” and “worse” than Esperanto…
It’s not that I don’t know how to say it, or that even YOU yourself can’t easily derive it without a Zamenhof-like “phrasebook” for kids. It’s just that you Esperantists don’t really want to see it - obviously, my “round-about reply” was intentional, because you didn’t (and don’t) actually want to know how that sentence or any other is said, but only to praise Esperanto and criticize PIE, that’s why I went ahead with the real discussion you were looking for with your question, about how a language cannot be absolutely “better” or “easier” than others. If you had taken a look at PIE reconstruction - not to talk about our works, prepared as easy introductions for interested learners -, it’s not hard to see that such a sentence might be said e.g. “maghō (an) dhūmātu kei?”, lit. ‘can-I (int. part.) smoke here?’, explained as:
1) For common verb of PIE root magh-, ‘power’ (see Etymonline), compare O.Eng., Old High German magan, Old Church Slavonic mogǫ, Lith. moketi, possibly Gk. μηχος; in any case cf. Gk. μᾱχανά̄, O.Ind. maghá-, Alb. math-, Arm. marthankh, Goth. mahts f. “power”, O.H.G. O.S. maht, O.E. meaht, might, etc. etc. and etc.
2) dhumos, ’smoke’, already explained, from which also PIE dhūmāiō (exactly as in Lat. fūmāre, which your Zamenhof deemed “better” for your creation, renaming it as the “easier” [?!] “fumi“), compare also the same verb in Skr. dhūmāyati, Old High German tūmōn, etc, all used with the basic meaning “give off smoke”, and only later and dialectally to “inhale and exhale the smoke from a burning cigarette, cigar, pipe, etc”. That’s why I said you had to make such innovations if you wanted to use Indo-European as a modern language today, as Proto-Indo-Europeans didn’t ’smoke cigarettes’, so they didn’t have a verb for that :-p… From those innovations for modern terms - common to all language revivals - to your fully created Zamenhofer arbitrary code+words there is a wide distance, unless you don’t want to follow the necessary abstraction to see it.
3) The infinitive - an innovation for Late PIE, which used mostly verbal nouns until then - could be made in -tu or -ti; usually -tu is selected because it was apparently (later) dialectally more widespread. That happens often with real, natural languages: There are multiple dialectal variants - like the example above about PIE sāwel and its variants, which you seemingly misunderstood as a “failure” of natural languages if confronted with conlangs -, and people (like language regulators, or linguistic experts, or philologists, or even popular TV showmen…) generally choose one variant as the standard for the language - even if the other variants might also be used - because natural language speakers don’t usually trust illuminated Zamenhofs to select the words they should use…
4) “kei” from loc. of PIE ke/ko, ‘this’, which was in PIE (and is in modern IE languages) used for “here” (see Etymonline), in fact cognate with English ‘here’. There are a thousand possible combinations of this particle.
5) And the common VO syntax of Indo-European dialects and probably common to Late PIE, which might obviously (as in sentences in Hittite, Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek) have been used together with a more formal OV syntax in that late stage; and the common interrogative particle an for yes/no questions, you might already know from Latin and Greek; our grammar’s Syntax Appendix sums up the latest research on the field, but you have other works dedicated solely to Indo-European archaic syntax and PIE reconstructed syntax, if you like.
You can indeed consult (you could also have consulted before) these terms and the common Late PIE syntax further in our free online Pokorny’s Proto-Indo-European dictionary in PDF (you can find the etymologies under dheu-4, magh-, and k̂o-/k̂e-), our English-PIE vocabulary, or our free online Proto-Indo-European lexicon, and the simple grammar behind that sentence in our free online Indo-European grammar, etc. which we offer for anyone with interest in learning Proto-Indo-European, as well as in any other introductory or reference book about the Proto-Indo-European language if you prefer other reference books, instead of information from popular science or encyclopaedic sites like Wikipedia or Etymonline; but it is and was evident you are (still) not interested in learning Proto-Indo-European, but only in defending Esperanto over any other possibility.
I don’t know what Indo-European languages have to do with race. The fact that you wrongly identify “race=language”, or “ethnia=language” doesn’t make it true, nor obviously makes me “close to being racist” by supporting the adoption of Proto-Indo-European in Europe. By saying that, though, you are “close to” insulting me without a reason, just to attack PIE revival with the last possible dialectic resource, personal discredit… We talk about the “grandmother or ancestor of our Indo-European languages”, which are spoken by nearly 97% of the European Union population, and spoken as second language by probably up to 99%: If you find a ‘more democratic’ and ‘culturally neutral’ language (using Esperantist terms) for us European speakers, apart from your inventions and your imaginary world of flowers and ‘millions of Esperanto or Volapük speakers using the Vikipedio or the Vükiped’, please tell. And if you have any reasons whatsoever to think your Indo-European-mixed-inventions might be (in your words) “less racist” than PIE towards Basque or Finnish, you might also consider giving some good reasons instead of such anti-Indo-European language FUD crap…You are one comment away from identifying PIE revivalists with Nazis, thus accomplishing the so-called Godwin’s Law.
In fact WE waste our time discussing PIE revival with you conlangers and conlang supporters, and trying to inform you individually - don’t forget we create general learning and information resources in the Association website, so that we don’t have to discuss these matters individual by individual -, instead of working in our project. We have already lost a lot of time discussing how “absurd” it might be for you conlangers, or US citizens, or Canadians, or some British or Spanish nationalists (willing to see the EU as a mere customs union), or Classical Philologists from Romance-speaking countries (willing to see Latin as EU’s official language), or selfish English-, German- and French-speaking citizens (willing to see the English-German-French officious predominance and internal struggle perpetuated), etc. However, we are still constantly doing and proposing things with our “Dnghu programme” as Language Hat puts it, and are always open to criticism and scholar exchange about European union’s language policy, Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, Modern Indo-European writing, pronunciation, vocabulary or syntax rules, etc., whilst you Esperantists are apparently only open to repeating your “hooray Esperanto” (i.e. “Esperanto better” or “Esperanto easier” cliches) everywhere you find potential ‘competitors’ for the world domination ideas behind your loved inventions.
Ok. I agree with the thousands of millions of real language speakers who clearly decided NOT to take seriously your “absurd” inventions as languages. And I also agree with those millions European scholars and students who did and do learn and help reconstruct and speak Proto-Indo-European, even if none of them own a (popular?) American weblog like ‘Language Hat’ to praise PIE, or if we (in your words) ‘don’t have a “phrasebook” to be able to say “can I smoke here?” in Proto-Indo-European’: the best reason an Esperantist can give not to learn Proto-Indo-European, that’s a rational point of view…! And I especially agree with the evident scientifical and historical facts, in that Proto-Indo-European was a real natural spoken language, that it has been reconstructed with enough confidence to build up a modern language system upon it - just like what was made in Israel with Hebrew -, and that - unlike the thousand Esperantos and Volapükos out there - a Modern Indo-European language has some chances of being EU’s official language in the future, which might benefit us all, not only Europeans; and I obviously don’t need your approval or agreement - nor that of your Language Hat, or any other personal blogger, or American linguist, or nationalist, or any anti-European or national language hooligan in general - to come to that rational conclusion, because I myself am convinced about it: so you can bring me a million critical personal opinions and beliefs more about the “Dnghu programme”, and - however ‘popular’ or ‘good’ you might think they are - still I’ll find more rational what actually IS more rational.
If you want to see Europe united under a common language, then you will probably arrive to the same conclusion as we did; if you just want others to speak your creation because you find it “better”, or “easier”, or “X-er” than other languages you weren’t able to learn, or you didn’t want to take enough time to learn, or because some Esperantist/s convinced you that you didn’t need to learn natural languages anymore, that they are “too difficult”, and now you don’t want to accept you’ve lost your time learning that things instead of real languages, then further discussion is maybe useless, I agree with you.
Of course, it’s up to you to say “good-bye” to questioning conlangs’ real future in the European Union, and helping us all speak a common language.
Thank you for your comments, and good luck.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I’ve read about the history of smoking - which I deemed imported to Eurasia from America in the 16th century - and found that it was already used (Wikipedia) for Medical purposes in India, being its Sanskrit name dhumapana, lit. “drinking smoke”.
Therefore, we have another possible modern term - apart from the European one via intransitive PIE dhūmāiō into transitive and intransitive L.Lat. fūmāre -, MIE dhumopōnom, “smoke drinking”, a compound made from PIE dhumos, ’smoke’, Skr. dhuma-, already explained, and pōnom, ‘drinking, hence beverage’, cf. Skr. pānam n. “drinking, beverage”, Gk. εὔπωνος (MIE supōnós), “pleasant to drink” M.Ir. ā̈n f. “vessel”, etc. Thus verb dhumopibō, ‘drink smoke’.
But, following the necessary abstraction, I guess smoking marihuana for medical purposes, i.e. “smoke drinking”, is not the same as the use of “give off smoke” with a transitive sense, hence “inhale and exhale smoke” - therefore, probably dhūmāiō is still the best option for a modern verb meaning “smoking a cigarette, pipe, etc.”, especially for a European PIE; if the objective were actually to inhale and retain in the lungs that smoke more time than usual, i.e. “drink that smoke”, which is a special kind of smoking, then the Indian term should be preferred.
BECAUSE OF THESE QUESTIONS we need to propose PIE revival and to work with IE experts on the actual shape of a Modern Indo-European language, to work on the language as it should be used today; and because there are (and there can be) no illuminated conlangers coming up with “great” and “easy” inventions or revelations on PIE, but a natural language with many dialectal variants and some very specific meanings that have to be carefully studied, so that correct decisions can be made, and a common (i.e. non-dialectal) formal language spoken in Europe. Therefore, to speak a modern natural language is not just knowing how to say “father” and “mother”, or a sentence like “can I smoke here?” written in some one-hour-made phrasebook…
May 31st, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Ah, so here is where all the action has been. What fun.
One note: even though it’s not an IE language Turkish uses the word drink (içmek) to also mean smoke, so there’s an interesting parallel.
I have to admit that as an auxlanger (Ido) the MIE idea seemed a bit strange at first, but it’s possible that the average person’s aversion to a constructed language will doom easy-to-learn IALs regardless of how they market themselves, who knows.
I did notice on the Spanish news broadcasts that you’re not completely averse to giving a few examples of the language in use, so hopefully we can see more of that. There should be no problem as long as you include a disclaimer that there could be some changes later on. It’s nice to have something that concrete to show to a person that isn’t as interested in languages and linguistics as people like us are.
May 31st, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Yes, a little bit of movement some days ago
But it’s usually very quiet here, sadly.
I agree, we need texts in PIE, we need podcasting, we need everything, and almost nothing has been made; and, we lose our time in endless discussions instead of preparing texts and learning material. BUT, the discussion with conlangers isn’t usually about learning PIE; nor is about criticizing conlanging or IALs, but actually just about promoting PIE:
When we proposed PIE revival (2006), even with the University prize, news in Spanish newspapers and all that, it was like …… in the Net. Nobody talked about it; it was ‘just another Esperanto’ with its tiny moment of fame, as many other conlangs have had. And today the Internet is the best option for an international project like ours; without it, PIE revival could take years to get known.
Then, after some months (in 2007), I wrote a boring post here about Esperanto, compared with Proto-Indo-European point by point, both as possible (1) international language and (2) common language for the EU. I think it was - at first at least - a balanced comparison, not just “invention vs. reality” and that stuff I write from time to time… Within days, some people posted it in other groups and blogs (it all began in Spanish Rediris, I think), and we had more visits to the project, criticism, AND collaborations than ever before! Some weeks after that, in fact, we appeared again on blogs, the newspaper, and the TV. That was the second wave of news, thanks to those angry Esperantists willing to destroy the project with strong criticism: in fact, they did spread the project, because they have a wide Internet community.
Therefore, even if I don’t like PIE revival to be related to Esperanto - because of the very aim and nature of this project, to attract people interested in natural languages - it is obvious that there are some IAL projects (Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Volapük, Lojban, etc.) that have nowadays more supporters and communities than ours, and that their supporters might be more interested in PIE revival than others, because most of us are looking for the same idea, a common language. So, if we don’t want the project to quietly slide into oblivion, some flames with those supporters are necessary from time to time to attract their attention…
Indeed, if you take such discussions with enough sense of humour, everybody wins: we PIE revivalists, all conlangers and IAL supporters, and everybody else, all from (a) the reasons that are given, and (b) the information that grows in the Internet. However annoyed people might get with these debates, I think the social benefit is higher, and one has always the possibility to stop arguing…
May 31st, 2008 at 7:26 pm
In fact, about the need for more texts and translations, the problem is many of us don’t still feel comfortable speaking Proto-Indo-European, and those who speak it aren’t confortable with the so-called Web 2.0…
Fernando López-Menchero has written almost every correction and addition to the Grammar since version 2.xx. His emails are often written in PIE - as a Classical philologist, expert in Latin and Italic languages and Ancient Greek, with a Master in Indo-European Studies, he speaks and writes a refined version of PIE (with archaic syntax and pure PIE vocabulary) I cannot always follow… But, as many philologists, he uses more traditional tools (like Microsoft Word and e-mails) than Blogs, Wikis or Forums, so I have to incorporate manually all his proposals (sent individually to me) to our web resources, be it XLS or DOC, formatting them as PDF and/or HTML… It is a pity he cannot lead the web project himself, working on the websites directly and speaking directly in PIE
When I presented the theoretical project I just wanted to propose the political aspect of it, because I had it in mind already for some years, and ask/let others do the linguistic work. But, things never happen as expected, and I had to learn the language reconstruction and work on the websites, legal aspects of the Association, on different learning resources, etc. even if there are enough Indo-Europeanists, IAL communities and Web experts out there to do the job far better than us language & web fans… It is evident people want to join projects they see strong enough to spend their time with, so first of all we have to show we believe in it. I hope these efforts are worth it, and we can eventually build up a strong community supporting Proto-Indo-European language revival, at least as strong as the Esperantist one, but in less time and concentrated in Europe!
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:54 pm
[...] professionals” to propose a trustable PIE revival. A recent example of this is our latest Esperantist visitor, saying I am “close to being racist” because I propose PIE for the EU - thus obviously [...]
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:55 pm
[...] professionals” to propose a trustable PIE revival. A recent example of this is our latest Esperantist visitor, saying I am “close to being racist” because I propose PIE for the EU - thus obviously [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
“I can understand the Esperantist reticence to dismiss their wrongly-directed past efforts and hopes, but the time and work already wasted learning or supporting Esperanto won’t be recovered.”
“Esperanto has obviously failed as an international language”
“it’s time for some of you practical Europeans to get rid of this ‘art’ called conlanging”
Esperanto strives for an international language, PIE is intended for europeans, as you say. Many esperantists are not europeans and you cannot expect them to support your project since they have not been invited to your party. I therefore think that Esperanto and PIE have different objectives, so such a debate between esperantists and PIE-ists is meaningless.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
In fact, Esperanto is intended especially for Europeans, not only because of its historical aims in Europe, but also because of concepts like “easiness” (read more about that equivocal Esperantist concept) and “cultural neutrality”, both aimed at European speakers. Thus, apparently its objective WAS to be “an international language” (back in 1900, when international meant something less international than today…) but, following the recent creation of a EU-based Esperanto political party, and the bad reaction of many European Esperantists to the PIE revival for Europe since its proposal two years ago (like the recent comments made by Esperantists in PIE revival presentation in Toulouse’ ‘Forum des Langues’), I guess it’s Esperantists who wanted (and many still want) to play a role in Europe and outside, while that don’t quite fit their language supposed historical objectives nor (as we want to demonstrate) its supposed qualities as an “easy” and “neutral” language…
Our project is a political and practical one, intended for the European Union first. We would like PIE revival to reach everyone, but we cannot expect a language revival for the EU to succeed if we try to make efforts building or supporting communities in America or Asia from the beginning… Everyone is “invited to our party”, as you put it, but we don’t have the means necessary to make something personally outside Europe.
About the different objectives, I agree. It’s like being “globalist” or “localist”, or like being “leftist” or “conservative” - discussions about what opinion or option is ‘better’ is probably useless.
But, are discussions about the reasons behind this or that specific decision, about rational concepts used to support this or that language adoption, like ‘easiness’ or ‘neutrality’, or debating the very concept of ‘language’, meaningless? No, it’s meaningful, always, as practical and rational decisions taken in politics, whether by “conservatives”, “leftists”, “globalists” or “regionalists”, because (apart from the theories and opinions behind each argument) current decisions can be changed and improved.
Esperantists have already an international community with dozens of associations around the world, so, if the concept behind Esperantism is really to speak the “best” (in any possible way) common language - a change in the specific language (from Esperanto to PIE) wouldn’t be a hard choice if we discuss the reasons behind adopting Esperanto - that are reduced today mostly to the “number of speakers” argument [in fact with a clear lack of any neutral data whatsoever to assert that x people "speaks" or "doesn't speak" the language...]
There are a lot of questions around Esperantism, and maybe whole communities relying on incorrect answers that could be easily dismissed if debated. To discuss them is indeed interesting.