Fernando López-Menchero has just published the first part of his A Practical Guidebook for Modern Indo-European Explorers (2018).
It is a great resource to learn Late Proto-Indo-European as a modern language, from the most basic level up to an intermediate level (estimated B1–B2, depending on one’s previous background in Indo-European and classical languages).
Instead of working on unending details and discussions of the language reconstruction, it takes Late Proto-Indo-European as a learned, modern language that can be used for communication, so that people not used to study with university manuals on comparative grammar can learn almost everything necessary about PIE in the most comfortable way.
A Guidebook for Modern Indo-European Explorers (Part I), by Fernando López-Menchero, is online! https://t.co/L82Zx75bAj It is a self-learning method of Late PIE as a modern language (A1 up to B1-B2 level), divided into fun lessons with key grammar and culture details. pic.twitter.com/rmWm2m3vfs
— Academia Prisca (@dnghu) November 21, 2018
(see also the announcement on Facebook)
NOTE. Even though we help each other with our works, Fernando is not the least interested in genetics (the “steppe ancestry” or the “R1b–R1a” question, or any other issue involving population genomics), or even too much about archaeology or the homeland question (although he uses the mainstream view that Late Proto-Indo-Europeans expanded from Yamna). His only interest is language reconstruction, and I doubt you can find anything else in his works but pure love for linguistics, including this one.
I was starting to call his project of a self-learning method The Winds of Winter, seeing how it appeared to be always in the making, but never actually finished. It seems that the publication of this first part will make my revision of the Indo-European demic diffusion model become the true The Winds of Winter here, in this our common series of books on Late Proto-Indo-European and its dialects…
As you can see, I am publishing less and less in this blog lately, and it’s all just to be able to finish a revision in time (that is, before more new genetic research compels me to delay it again…). It is a very thorough revision, so those of you who liked it are not going to be disappointed.
I hoped to have it ready for mid-December, but, as it turns out, due to different unexpected delays, I am now more confident about a mid-January / February date, and that only if everything goes well.
