Indo-European Languages Forum

I, a second-year student of Music history and theory and linguistics at the Unversity of Toronto, Canada, really enjoy this site and would greatly like to help out here.
I have noticed several problems, however.

1) If there is only one person in the phrase (e.g. me, thou, him/her, we, you, they), there is no need for a pronoun; the ending of the verb does that instead. So, "I love the woman" would be "Leubhmi cenom.", NOT "Eg leubhmi cenom"! On some pages, I have found this mistake.

2) There is, as has been mentioned, a great deal of overly Latin and overly Germanic wording on the site. I would like to help combat this inaccuracy. For example: the word "Welcémo:n" is terribly Germanic. Better migh be a word meaning literally "Good having-come" or "Good arrival", which would be constructable as "(E)sucémwes" - its subparts being (E)su- (good) + cem- (come) -wes (-ing [perfect], i.e. "having _").

Also, notice how there are short forms in English and German such as etc. (et cetera, Latin for an so on), and its German equvalien usw. (und so weiter, meaning "and so on"). This could be transplanted without great difficulty into Europaio: this-this-and "qisqisqe", or shortened "qqq."

3) One of the most discomforting things for me is the lack of palatals. There is no reason they should be lacking! Such sounds exist across Easter Europe, in Slavic, Baltic and Hungarian (the fact that the last one is not Indo-European is irrelevant on this point). To write them, I see three options:
A) Use f for palatal k and v for palatal g.
B) Use an added sign (like ^ or *) to note palatization, just like the soft sign in Cyrillic
C) Have someone make a font thay includes a seperate pair of letters for the two palatal sounds.
The inclusion of palatal letters would help diminich the number of homonyms, such as k^ei- (lie) and kei- (set in motion) and k^em- (hornless) and kem- (love).

NOTE: Aside from Pokorny's masterpiece, "The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-indo-European World" by J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams is a very good book from which a great deal of roots can be found. Of course, one needs to be wary of their use of h4!

Hi, Seadog.

We will change the vocabulary for 'purer' PIE vocabulay when possible.

Thank you for your suggestions and improvements.

Best regards,

Carlos

(we have moved the question about the palatovelars to the general PIE-MIE discussion, to let others talk about its reconstruction in PIE and its use in MIE)