*Dʰu̯órom *Bʰl̥gés

August 2, 2015 7:40 PM

The *Bʰlog
posted by the man of twists and turns (11 comments total)

This is great! The title made me think it was going to be something Lovecraft-y, but instead it's about the ancient knowledge and unpronounceable speech of the Old Ones!
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:50 PM on August 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

Who is sky god?
Bear.
Bear is sky god.
posted by fallingbadgers at 9:47 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

How can this BE
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:16 PM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Calvert Watkins (who was on Byrd's dissertation committee, apparently) has an intriguing book called How to Kill A Dragon on reconstructing Indo-European poetry if you're into the whole PIE thing.
posted by mr_deerheart at 11:15 PM on August 2, 2015

Who is sky god?
Bear.
Bear is sky god.

You three lines puzzled me.
I was hoping that you were a Proto knock knock joke.
Or that you were hit from the Indo DEVO.
Now I think that you're a paean.
posted by otherchaz at 3:41 AM on August 3, 2015

Very cool, but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in over a year.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:31 AM on August 3, 2015

but instead it's about the ancient knowledge and unpronounceable speech of the Old Ones!

Funny you should say that, because the blog author's research (Andrew Miles Bird; he's a professor at Kentucky) is mostly concerned with figuring out what Proto-Indo-European sounded like. He's been focusing mostly on laryngeals which are a class of sounds in PIE that we mostly have evidence for from how they affect other sounds (and a little bit of evidence from Hittite).

It's a bit like, if you walked into a room with a bunch off different paint colors, and figured out that some of the colors had been mixed with another color paint that's not there anymore-- you can sort of figure out the missing color by working backwards.
posted by damayanti at 5:20 AM on August 3, 2015

He has a link to a page from Archaeology where he recites a story in reconstructed PIE.

I stand by my description :-)
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:50 AM on August 3, 2015

Ugh, he pronounces it with a tacky Northeastern Proto-Indo-Europe accent.
posted by moonmilk at 6:41 AM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

It doesn't seem to have been updated since I wrote about it a year ago, and as Piotr Gąsiorowski said in the comment thread, "As far as I can see, Andrew Byrd (an excellent Indo-Europeanist) is the administrator of the *Bhlog but almost all the stuff has been written by his students as a kind of out-of-class exercise, hence its uneven quality." It was a good idea, but it seems not to have gone anywhere.
posted by languagehat at 7:56 AM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, blogs are so very 1999 BCE.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:35 AM on August 4, 2015