List of Proto-Indo-European roots present in Sambahsa now complete

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Olivier Simon continues to impress with his latest announcement: a list of Proto-Indo-European roots in Sambahsa. Though Sambahsa is based on Indo-European, which words are based on PIE and which aren't are not obvious to the casual user, but now you can see them here. If you've ever seen Dnghu's Modern Indo-European Grammar (no updates from them since January, by the way) you'll recognize the list, as they have a full list of PIE vs. MIE roots compared with other Indo-European languages in the back, and this is what has been adapted to show those that have been adopted in Sambahsa.

One interesting thing about creating a language from PIE roots is that you retain access to some pretty archaic but interesting terms, like daper (sacrificial animal) and dieupter (Father Sky, the king god). Such terms are usually just adopted in accordance with their meaning in other IALs instead of having their own terms. Ido would say something like sakrifikala animalo (or sakrifikajo) for the former and maybe Cielo-Patro for the latter. It's not a bad idea to structure a language in that way as the PIE base takes care of these ancient terms, while Latin and other Western European languages make up modern / scientific words. That results in quite a bit of vocabulary to learn, but then again such vocabulary is only used by those who are knowledgeable in and who wish to talk about such subjects, same as with chemistry, astronomy and anything else. Voiced velar fricative doesn't mean anything to anyone but a linguist, in spite of technically being an English term.

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