Indo-European languages of Europe

Some years after the discovery of the Nebra Sky disc and observatory (dated ca. 1600 BC), near what was then called the “German Stonehenge” (see Deutsche Welle news), archaelogists have unearthed another similar structure, but this time probably related to the Indo-European settlers who still spoke Europe’s (or Northwestern) Proto-Indo-European, if the timeline and space [...]

The latest improvements added to the Indoeuropean Translator Widget have been included in the simpler Wordpress Translation Plugin available in this personal blog.
It now includes links to automatic translations from and into all language pairs offered by Google Translation Engine, apart from other language pairs (from individual languages, like English or Spanish) into other online [...]

Less than half of the Irish population voted on the Lisbon Treaty, the so-called Constitution of the European Union. In other words: 862,415 votes against and 752,451 in favour, giving a majority of 109,964 against, decided this time the future of nearly 500 million Europeans. Some pro-Europeans are asking now what eurosceptics have often asked [...]

I don’t like to write about ‘domestic’ problems, so to speak, and I don’t usually do it because I cannot be neutral, but I think this one has transnational implications that go beyond Spain’s language policy - or, better, the language policy of Spain’s Autonomous (i.e. ’slightly less than federal’) Communities - to reach the [...]

The latest upgrades are only available in the simpler Wordpress Translation Widget Plugin.
You can download it from the official Wordpress Plugin Repository site. New upgrades will automatically appear on your Wordpress blog dashboard.
As always, this widget plugin, when activated from the Design tab of your Wordpress blog dashboard, will put links - with [...]

For native speakers of most modern Romance languages (apart from some reminiscence of the neuter case), Nordic (Germanic) languages, English, Dutch, or Bulgarian, it is usually considered “difficult” to learn an inflected language like Latin, German or Russian: cases are a priori felt as too strange, too “archaic”, too ‘foreign’ to the own system of [...]

Following Mithridates’ latest post and comment on artificial language compared to revived language, I consider it appropriate to share my point of view on this subject. For me, the schematic classification of languages into “natural” and “artificial” could be made more or less as follows, from ‘most natural’ (1) to ‘most artificial’ (20):
NOTE 1: There [...]

Rhetoric (Wikipedia) is the art of harnessing reason, emotions and authority, through language, with a view to persuade an audience and, by persuading, to convince this audience to act, to pass judgement or to identify with given values. The word derives from PIE root wer-, ’speak’, as in MIE zero-grade wrdhom, ‘word’, or full-grade werdhom, [...]