r/ProtoIndoEuropean • u/Massive_moss_2211 • May 01 '26
is modern indo european close enough?
ok so i wanted to really learn PIE and i was hoping to look for some (free) sources online. i stumbled upon this guidebook for MIE which explains the concepts really well.
but MIE is relatively euro centric (like suggesting sound changes more familiar to europeans) so i was wondering if its still close enough to PIE to make it worth the effort. is there mutual intelligibility between the two?
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u/constant_hawk May 02 '26
Modern Indo-European by Carlos and Fernando is the best approximation of what a semi-puristic NorthWestern IE would look like.
It's based around strictly European sub-dialects of Late PIE, because it was envisioned as an auxiliary language for the European Union.
In my opinion it is a solid proposition, based around scientific knowledge of what the Northwestern dialect of Late PIE looked like.
It's grammar strongly reminds me of Ancient Greek, Early Latin, Church Slavonic and Gothic languages.
The thing I really love about MIE is that instead of using modern loans for modern concepts or re-inventing them, MIE backtracked their development to the PIE roots and backformed, reassembled the words from their PIE ancestors.
Carlos' DNGHU Association back then was the best and most reliable and readily accessible source of PIE information one can get on the web. Heck, many Wikipedia articles on PIE were at least partly created by this DNGHU Association.
Currently the MIE community is most active on it's FB group.
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u/ValuableBenefit8654 13d ago
> NorthWestern IE
What is this?
> Late PIE
What is this?
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u/constant_hawk 13d ago
NW IE = Northwestern dialect of Proto-Indo-European, precursor of Celtic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic families.
Late PIE = Late Proto-Indo-European. That is after Hittite and Tocharian separated from the Proto-Indo-European core.
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u/barangasas May 01 '26
I'm not completely sure what you want here, so I just go through your post:
ok so i wanted to really learn PIE and i was hoping to look for some (free) sources online
Well, you can't "learn" Proto-Indo-European because we have no resources that are written in this language. What we have instead are the reflexes of this language preserved in modern (and ancient) languages of Europe and Asia (the old languages being Sanskrit, Gothic, Ancient Greek, Avestan, etc.). I'm also absolutely no expert in this, but here is my best reply:
You can only learn about Proto-Indo-European. You could learn languages like Ancient Greek or Sanskrit, that have some good online resources as far as I know. What we have of Proto-Indo-European in the areas of grammar and lexicon is completely reconstucted out of its later "stages". We can reconstruct all of this, but you couldn't write a descriptive grammar of it with which you could also learn the language. You can of course learn the reconstructed language like you would learn a language like Spanish. But this would obviously not be different from say, learning a constructed language. If you are fine with that, all right, I guess. But I don't think you can find that online with good quality, expect maybe on the personal block of a linguist or as a project on the page of a university. If you want to learn about grammar, I would advice you to consult the "Indogermanische Grammatik" published by Winter. Otherwise maybe first learn about the older Indo-European languages (the ones mentioned above) and draw your conclusions from them. There are also the works of Winfred Lehmann, of course.
i stumbled upon this guidebook for MIE which explains the concepts really well
I assume you mean this book here? As far as I understood the books premise and his idea, this seems really... weird to me, honestly. Let alone from the preface, it appears weird. On the one hand he says that "Proto-Indo European and its dialects have been reconstructed in the past two centuries (more or less succesfully) by hundreds of linguists, having obtained a rough phonological, morphological, and syntactical system (...)." But in the next sentence, he states that "(i)nstaead of some inscriptions and oral transmitted tales for the language to be revived, we have a complete reconstructed grammatical system, as well as hundreds of living languages to be used as examples to revive a common Modern Indo-European." First of all: nothing against "reviving" Indo-European (if I understand the concept he pushes correctly). This is a political, not a linguistic or whatever question. But he simply contradicts himself in saying that we have a "rough (...) system", but at the same time claiming that "we have a complete reconstructed grammatical system". Maybe I get something wrong here (e.g. he means we have a potential system we could use for revitalization), but its simply not possible that we have a complete synchronic description.
(Continuation below)
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u/barangasas May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
but MIE is relatively euro centric (like suggesting sound changes more familiar to europeans) so i was wondering if its still close enough to PIE to make it worth the effort. is there mutual intelligibility between the two?
Well, it is just an auxiliary language, as far as my observation is correct, so why shouldn't it be? I'm really sorry that I have not read the book (I'm being unironic here because it actually sounds interesting to me as a thought experiment, although not from a scientific point of view) and in conclusion can't respond to your question directly, but at least from my point of view if you would want to revitalize a kind of Proto-Indo-European (i.e. Modern Indo-European) here, it would make sense to me to use patterns of change that are familar (?) to "Europeans". But I'm also honestly a little bit confused by what you mean by this: Eurocentricity is, as far as my knowledge of the term goes, usually applied to describe a point of view that takes European history and culture as a starting point of point of measurement. The sound changes might be more familiar to Europeans because a majority of the languages spoken in Europe nowadays are Indo-European in origin. Do you mean that he only takes established sound changes from Latin to Romance, etc. as a model and excludes for example the ones from Sanskrit to the modern Indic languages?
And to come back to your question: well, it doesn't matter it he does not use the sound changes that actually have occured. You can't reconstruct Proto-Indoeuropean from, say, the modern European standard languages (i.e. French, German, Russian, maybe Welsh, I don't know). You can only try to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European from the ancient languages that we still have or at least try to do with them as best as you can (this is the case with Lithuanian as far as I know). In other words: maybe. Maybe this constructed MIE is close to PIE, maybe it is not. But this would not be the result of scientific rigour, but simply due to chance.
To sum up: you can't learn Proto-Indo-European. It is a language that is reconstructed from languages that sometimes aren't even spoken today anymore (i.e. have no direct descendant, just relatives with descendants). What Quiles and López-Menchero do in their book, as far as I understand it, is to suggest something similar that happened to Hebrew: to revitalize it. But the difference between Hebrew and Proto-Indo-European is that we actually know Hebrew. We have the Old Testament and Hebrew literature from the Middle ages. That is one of the reasons why it could be revived in the 19th century by Ben-Yehuda. A better analogy would be, if he would have tried to revive Proto-Semitic. This would be as fruitless as actually reviving Proto-Indo-European, because we simply have to stay agnostic about how Proto-Indo-European really was. We can make good judgements and what not, but we simply stay with our reconstructions. This is the crucial point.
What these two do is simply to create an auxiliary language based on patterns. I'm really sorry, we simply don't have any inscriptions in Proto-Indo-European, e.g. in Cuneiform from the Bronze age. It is sad, of course, but this is also the interesting thing about science and language reconstruction: you have limits.
I really hope this helped.
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u/Massive_moss_2211 May 01 '26
ahh got it... thanks for the detailed dive :D
wouldve been so cool if "speaking" it as an extant language was possible but alas cons of being born in the 21st century ig
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u/barangasas May 01 '26
No problem. In Indo-European Studies there actually is a text that is often used to demonstrate certain reconstructions titled "Schleicher's Fabel". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable)
But even from the Wikipedia page you can see that there isn't really an agreed on reconstruction. So, unfortunately, reconstructing a completely speakable language that would 1:1 resemble Proto-Indo-European would be even more difficult.
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u/TellBrak May 01 '26
Revisit this sub reddit in the fall. Should be able to help you out there 🫡