Linguist geekery fun: Schleicher's Fable in several ancient Indo-European dialects!

August Schleicher was a 19th-century scholar of Proto-Indo-European (henceforth PIE), the ancestral language that spawned most of the languages of modern-day Europe (you’re reading one of PIE’s descendants right now). In 1868 he wrote and published a short fable, called The King and The God, a story told in a reconstructed version of PIE.

Dnghu has a free project called Indo-European languages, a wiki for the languages from this family. My favorite page has versions of Schleicher’s Fable not only in PIE, but also in its descendants such as Anatolian (c.2500 BC) and Proto-Balto-Slavic (c.1000 BC). It’s super-cool to see what these reconstructions look like and their similarities. You can check them out in handy HTMLand PDFform, as well.

Cool!