Esperanto…

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…