I have become thoroughly enthralled with the reconstruction of the Proto Indo European language, cramming more esoteric knowledge into a brain already jam packed with an assortment of stuff that is pretty far off the beaten path as knowledge goes to begin with.
And yet, it's so damn cool. It's a probably pretty good approximation of the words uttered by people who lived 5000 years ago and whose language went on to spin off most of the languages spoken from Iceland to India and by the majority of human beings on the planet. Crazy.
Even crazier to try to see how we got to English from the below sort of stuff.
For me:
*Ptnes kh2hxom tisrhxom m nants h1regwesi-kwe h2h2kem h2om bhrhateres-kwe h3gwhins gwhegwhnem
*h2om hesrm moy h1en-ter nuh1ou wkwosyo dhh1h2 H1itos moy hatm-ro kn Tlkos moy do h4rons kwdh
For Ixxie (the only person whose eyes don't cross and whose mind doesn't wander far and wide when I start talking about this stuff):
*h2om welwstrihaom h1smi Hxoluh2 moy wihxrm moy kwdhemi mdmi-kwe h2om h2str deim ds tsyo h1smi
And yet, it's so damn cool. It's a probably pretty good approximation of the words uttered by people who lived 5000 years ago and whose language went on to spin off most of the languages spoken from Iceland to India and by the majority of human beings on the planet. Crazy.
Even crazier to try to see how we got to English from the below sort of stuff.
For me:
*Ptnes kh2hxom tisrhxom m nants h1regwesi-kwe h2h2kem h2om bhrhateres-kwe h3gwhins gwhegwhnem
*h2om hesrm moy h1en-ter nuh1ou wkwosyo dhh1h2 H1itos moy hatm-ro kn Tlkos moy do h4rons kwdh
For Ixxie (the only person whose eyes don't cross and whose mind doesn't wander far and wide when I start talking about this stuff):
*h2om welwstrihaom h1smi Hxoluh2 moy wihxrm moy kwdhemi mdmi-kwe h2om h2str deim ds tsyo h1smi
So, are those sentences in Proto-Indo-European -- keeping in mind that PIE is not known from written history, but inferred from current and past documented languages?
I can imagine a PIE phrase book, with useful sentences for tourists, like "Can you please direct me to the central bus station?", and "I demand to be taken to the American embassy."