Renewed German reparation demands by Poland mean also renewed territorial disputes

Maybe it is my impression, and this has been going on for a long time now, but in the past few months I have received many notifications from German newspapers about increasing demands by the Polish Government for war reparations (see today, five days ago, and see some editorials on the subject by the Berliner Zeitung and Die Welt).

This might seem a quick and easy way of obtaining money for the Polish administration; after all, Greece has been trying to do that since their economic crisis, not the least because of Germany’s strong support of austerity … Read the rest “Renewed German reparation demands by Poland mean also renewed territorial disputes”

Wiik’s theory about the spread of Uralic into east and central Europe, and the Uralic substrate in Germanic and Balto-Slavic

I recently wrote about how Wiik’s model was wrong in supporting a Mesolithic European Vasconic-Uralic harmony – genetically based on the modern distribution of R1b vs. N1c haplogroups -, and thus also the disruption of this harmony by Indo-Europeans (supposedly a population of R1a-lineages invading central Europe from a Balkan homeland).

Romanticism does this quite frequently: it makes us believe in some esoteric fantasy, like the ethnic continuity of our ancestors in the region we live (and a far, far greater original territory that has been unfairly diminished by invaders), providing us with strong links to support our artificial … Read the rest “Wiik’s theory about the spread of Uralic into east and central Europe, and the Uralic substrate in Germanic and Balto-Slavic”

Bronze Age “German Stonehenge” of Saxony-Anhalt unearthed, maybe related to Europe’s Indo-European speakers

Some years after the discovery of the Nebra Sky disc and observatory (dated ca. 1600 BC), near what was then called the “German Stonehenge” (see Deutsche Welle news), archaeologists from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg have unearthed another similar structure, but this time probably related to the Indo-European settlers who still spoke Europe’s (or Northwestern) Proto-Indo-European, if the timeline and space have been correctly set by linguists and archaeologists.

While the Goseck observatory (reconstructed in the picture) was dated between 5000 and 4800 BC, this wooden construction – termed again “German Stonehenge” -, found not too far … Read the rest “Bronze Age “German Stonehenge” of Saxony-Anhalt unearthed, maybe related to Europe’s Indo-European speakers”

WordPress Translation Plugin – now using Google Translation from and into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.

The latest improvements added to the Indoeuropean Translator Widget have been included in the simpler WordPress Translation Plugin available in this personal blog.

It now includes links to automatic translations from and into all language pairs offered by Google Translation Engine, apart from other language pairs (from individual languages, like English or Spanish) into other online machine translators, viz Tranexp or Translendium.

Available language pairs now include English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan*, Czech, Chinese (traditional/simplified), Welsh*, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Persian*, French, Hindi, Croatian, Icelandic*, Italian, Hebrew*, Latin*, Korean, Hungarian*, Dutch, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese*), Romanian, Russian, … Read the rest “WordPress Translation Plugin – now using Google Translation from and into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.”

How ‘difficult’ (using Esperantist terms) is an inflected language like Proto-Indo-European for Europeans?

For native speakers of most modern Romance languages (apart from some reminiscence of the neuter case), Nordic (Germanic) languages, English, Dutch, or Bulgarian, it is usually considered “difficult” to learn an inflected language like Latin, German or Russian: cases are a priori felt as too strange, too “archaic”, too ‘foreign’ to the own system of expressing ideas. However, for a common German, Baltic, Slavic, Greek speaker, or for non-IE speakers of Basque or Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), cases are the only way to express common concepts and ideas, and it was also the common way of expression for speakers … Read the rest “How ‘difficult’ (using Esperantist terms) is an inflected language like Proto-Indo-European for Europeans?”