After another year of Indo-European language revival we owe a little summary of what (I think) has happened during the last 12 months, and how our expectations have developed.
The last year of 2007 has been great in terms of:
– Collaboration : thanks to the dozens of contributions we have now an almost stable phonological and morphological Indo-European Grammar, and, while the syntax still remains a muddy field, we are possibly as near as we can be to the original Proto-Indo-European language. Due to some demands in the past, we offered a printed version of the grammar, which won’t give us almost any benefits, but will allow us to send copies to different European and international libraries.
– Work : Not only external people, but also we (i.e. the original 4 + 2) have been working enough to obtain some sufficiently revised Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European resources, including our websites and our new projects. To get to work with the Indo-European language revival is tough for something that looks more like a hobby than a real university project; it’s funny that what we pretended once to be some kind of I+D University Foundation-Company has become just another European cultural association.
– News : THIS was something completely unexpected. After our 2006 news ‘boom’, so to speak, with tens of Spanish newspapers talking about the new European language after the university prize in innovation, we didn’t expect another year of public expectation. But, it happened again. All because of a Spanish Digg-like collaborative news site, Menéame, to which some blog-author sent his own news about us. Then, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo (currently the most visited online newspaper) made a report about the project, and following it the first Spanish television in regional news (TVE1) and the second (TVE2) in La 2 Noticias talked about it. After that, many blogs and tiny news sites have echoed it. After all those unexpected moves of the Spanish media, I just prefer not to think about how people and media will react to the project in the future; if news come, they will indeed be welcome…
– “Donations” : there are no direct money donations, but we are spending more and more each month, even though we don’t make a cent; we have thus to ask for it each time we want to do or create or publish something new. Also, time and work donation has been fantastic, as our Indo-European linguistics section alone can show.
– Corpus Linguistics : all work and releases concerning the Indo-European language are quickly released, so there is nothing more to explain about it.
It has been a bad year in terms of:
– New members : Today I’ve answered the last of a dozen mails of people interested in joining the Dnghu Association. As always, I guess we won’t get him, however good his CV is and his initial interest seems to be. We cannot offer anything but to work for free. I think it is clear enough in the Indo-European Language Association website, but maybe people just like to believe that the truth is different. I’ll repeat it: we are a few – from 4 to 6 members depending on the season -, plus some institutions that support our work, and that’s all. To join us now is (still) to work for nothing but to help Indo-European become a spoken language.
– Project and people handling : we still lead an unorganized group of people, instead of an organized association. We still plan hundreds of projects, create dozens of them, close all but one or two after some time, and then plan a hundred projects again. We dedicate too much time to documents and study, and not a second to get or retain potential users or members. We look for specialized workers, we ask for help to university professors, but do not rely on ‘normal’, ‘just interested’ people from other academic fields.
– Teaching and learning : apart from potential members, there are hundreds of potential learners who would just like to learn (Proto-)Indo-European and/or its early dialects (whatever the reason), that contact us from time to time asking for real learning methods or courses, whether self-learning material, online courses, foreign language courses at Biblos, etc. Last year the answer was easy: we didn’t have a stable grammar to work with. Now we just don’t have/get the time to prepare such learning materials.
– Language use : since the very beginning of the online project in 2005 we’ve had some kind of websites prepared for writing or speaking in Indo-European. We haven’t done it. Again, it’s probably more a question of time management than grammar issues, as the language we wanted to use is now correct enough to speak it.
And that’s all I can think of right now. I’ll try to write about our ideas for the future another day.
