Esperanto strives for an international language, PIE is intended for europeans, as you say.

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…

Many esperantists are not Europeans and you cannot expect them to support your project since they have not been invited to your party.

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.

I therefore think that Esperanto and PIE have different objectives, so such a debate between esperantists and PIE-ists is meaningless

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.

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.

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!

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…

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.

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…

Nor do you have any phrasebook of other useful sentences to begin a conversation in PIE

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…

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

I agree with the blog Language Hat that says your whole program is “absurd.”

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.