Indo-European Esperanto?

1,278 words

The fragmentation of prehistoric Proto-Indo-European (PIE) into a bewildering array of mutually unintelligible European (and, more broadly, Caucasian—Armenian, Iranian, Indic, Tocharian, and Anatolian) languages has severely hobbled the cause of white survival. Language and cultural differences have divided an essentially homogeneous population into separate nationalities and sub-nationalities incapable of networking effectively, rendering all of them easy prey to the depredations of hostile organizations and governments. It is ironic that Jews, blacks, and other aliens are regarded as fellow citizens by the vast majority of whites, while many whites, including their own cousins in the old country or the new lands, are categorized as “foreigners.” Insurmountable language barriers play a large role in this.

How to remove these barriers while simultaneously preserving robust local and regional identities poses a problem. But the first order of business is to establish effective cross-cultural communication between concerned racialists presently speaking a Babel of incomprehensible languages.

In this light, a quixotic proposal from a handful of Spaniards calling themselves the Dnghu Group—also known as the Indo-European Language Revival Group—to revive Proto-Indo-European as the lingua franca of the European Union merits examination. The Dnghu Group has established a presence on the World Wide Web to promote its objectives.

A thousand or more planned languages have existed over the past two centuries, approximately a dozen of which developed a community of speakers of some kind, however small.

The most successful artificial language is the globalist-oriented Esperanto, invented by Ludwig L. Zamenhoff (1859-1917), a Jewish ophthalmologist who, like Carlos Quiles, the creator and prime mover behind the current proposal, developed his system while a medical student. A street in Tel Aviv, Israel, is named in Zamenhoff’s honor.

Despite its “success,” Esperanto has not exactly caught on. According to one estimate, in 1927 there were 128,000 Esperanto speakers (0.006% of the world’s population), while today there are 2 million, or 0.033%—an increase, to be sure, but still a negligible number of people.

Modern Indo-European (MIE)

The proposed language, “Modern Indo-European” (MIE)—or, interchangeably, “Europaio”—is a reconstructed, auxiliary language derived from work originally done in 2006 by Quiles and María Teresa Batalla. Quiles, a native Spaniard in his late twenties, is currently a medical student at the University of Extramadura (Universidad de Extramadura), which is located in a remote region of west central Spain bordering Portugal. Maria Batalla was a fellow Extramdura student at the time.

In October 2009 Carlos Quiles published the 824-page second edition of A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, issued by CreateSpace, a print-on-demand subsidiary of Amazon.com and described as “a complete reference guide to a modern, revived Indo-European language.” The outdated first edition of Quiles’ grammar can be downloaded for free here.

The Dnghu Group hopes that Modern Indo-European will become the official language of the European Union in twenty to forty years, much as revived Hebrew became Israel’s official language after a similar span of time. The Revival Group also hopes that eventually MIE will become the dominant auxiliary language globally. Initially, however, it would be taught to Europeans as a second language.

According to the Dnghu website, if Europaio has not been accepted by 2050, “it would possibly mean that Indo-European is becoming another language revival failure,” as happened with “Latin in the European Union after its abandonment in the 19th c. (the ‘recent Latin’ revival, promoted in the Congrès International pour le latin vivant, 1956, now mostly abandoned and forgotten), Ancient/Classical Greek in Greece (also ‘puristic’ Greek, the so-called Katharevousa), or Classic Coptic in Egypt in the 19th c., promoted by the Coptic Church.”

Quiles writes:

We obviously knew before beginning with this that it is very difficult to [make] happen, but it could happen—as it did with Hebrew—and we work on this because it is a possibility, because we are Europeanists and want a country united under a common language. . . . We know we are not experts, and that there are lots of people more prepared than us to work on PIE reconstruction, but we have been saying since we started in 2004 that our objective is IE [Indo-European] revival, not to impose our ideas on PIE; we want experts to collaborate.

The Indo-European Language Revival Group recommends that people interested primarily in learning a second language not study Modern Indo-European, but rather English. “However, a good intermediate choice would be to learn Sanskrit, Old Greek or Latin, or even early Germanic or Balto-Slavic dialects, as they are all natural approaches to older PIE [Proto-Indo-European] and to modern languages alike.”

Occidental Linguistics

As expected, the group’s members are oblivious to the urgent racial problems touched upon in the introductory paragraphs. Modern Indo-European, they assert, “is not about Indo-European speakers’ race or genetics.” Instead, in the words of prime mover Quiles, it is “a dream about a future United Europe under one common language, Indo-European. A common country where we can move and communicate with others as US citizens do in their country, not just as exchange students or workers, or to sell or buy things.”

Despite such sincere disclaimers, jaded readers will not be surprised to learn that at least one obsessive individual has rabidly attacked the Dnghu idea as “racist” and “Nazi.” Based upon his name, physiognomy, psychological quirks, totalitarian proclivities, and thinly-disguised anti-white bigotry, he is most likely Jewish.

A glance at the historical record reveals that Modern Indo-European has some unacknowledged but intriguing predecessors, quite possibly unknown to its proponents. In addition to various constructed “pan-” tongues—pan-Teutonic, pan-Slavic, pan-Celtic—it has been maintained by some that Germany intended to establish a kind of “Basic German” as the international language of a postwar, united Aryan Europe.

The most consequential predecessor of MIE, however, is Occidental (known after WW II as Interlingue), a planned language created in 1922 by Baltic German naval officer Edgar de Wahl (1867-1948). It was exceptionally popular in Europe prior to the Second World War, ranking as the fourth most prevalent planned language. Occidental emphasized European linguistic forms coupled with a Eurocentric philosophy.

According to the late Donald J. Harlow, director of the Esperanto League of North America (ELNA), Edgar de Wahl, one of the first to learn Esperanto, “became the proponent of the only modification to the language’s structure that [Esperanto founder] Zamenhof found worthy of adoption after publication of the First Book.” However, Wahl grew disenchanted with Esperanto: “it simply was not Western enough for him.”

In Harlow’s opinion

the worst thing about Wahl’s language was the apparent philosophy of those who supported it. Wahl and his disciples were interested in the West, and to him the rest of the world was unimportant; it was doomed, or destined, to play, not merely a minor role, but no role at all. Civilization was a European phenomenon; only Europeans could be interested in international communication (plus those few Asians—Africans may not have entered into his world-view at all—who would consciously adopt the trappings of the West: seersucker suits, neckties, Catholicism and a Romance language), and so an international language should be intended only for Europeans. More specifically: Western Europeans; Wahl’s followers, like many Westerners of his day, generally expressed a cordial detestation for things Slavic, and this may have been the Estonian Wahl’s attitude, as well.

Whether this is an accurate depiction of Wahl’s or a majority of Occidental speakers’ views is impossible to say. Occidental’s last periodical, Cosmoglotta, ceased publication in 1985.

The Indo-European Language Revival Group’s proposed “Modern Indo-European” is not really an artificial, constructed language like Esperanto or Volapük, but rather a reconstructed historical language like Modern Hebrew. Although it is unlikely ever to see the light of day as envisaged, it is perhaps an instructive, if unconscious and unintentional, response to a real and pressing need: transnational white linguistic comprehensibility.

TOQ Online, November 2, 2009