We all love our indo-european languages, but has anyone learnt Modern Indo-European/Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European yet? Has anyone had a conversation with it?

I'm sure it will be an interesting thing to follow, especially if you are European (as you will likely be the only ones really concerned with it).

Anyway, for those who don't know about it:

http://dnghu.org/Indo-European-Language-Europe/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Indo-European

If anyone here has learnt it, how on earth did you go about it (there only seems to be complicated texts on the topic at the moment, at least where I've been looking) and is it easy?

EDIT: Ah, jes, I should add: before anyone goes on their high horse and complains about how this language is biased toward Europeans only and has nothing on Esperanto, that may be true, but keep in mind this is intended for a Pan-Europe language basically, and not an IAL.

An interesting project. Although IE languages are now spoken in a large area of the world and not only in Europe. Nevertheless, it seems hard to learn, pronunciation, declinaisons...
In France, we are regulary surprised of the big difficulties of kids to learn their own languages (french), so to learn an other one so difficult...
The language of European Union ? And what about the finnish, ungarians, maltese...do they not belong to Europe ?
But i'll try to have a big look on it !

How interesting...I'd be willing to try it out. I wonder if reconstructed ancestor languages would be more accepted than "artificial" planned languages invented by a single person.

Part of the contention with languages like Esperanto is that some people are against learning a language that is largely reflective of one person's ideas. Such a reconstructed language would in a way be "everyone's language" (at least for the people who speak descendants of that language).

Do you know if there are projects to reconstruct other language ancestors? Proto-Altaic perhaps? Or Proto Afro-Asiatic, Proto-Austronesian, etc?

Hey Eikored - I believe there are proto-altaic (or atleast attempts of, becuase of current scholarly disagreements e.g. "where did Japanese come from??"), proto-semetic and similar projects around (proto-slavic and uralic seem to be enjoying some success behind the proto-indo-european project).

A problem many of these projects is that any modern equivalent has yet to address things like aspiration (e.g. d vs dh), consonant clusters etc which many find ridiculously hard to differentiate (just look at our own Lernu forum ha ha), so I personally would either 'ido-ize' PIE to make it easier or wait for them to do it (could be a fun project making a conlang based off of it, not happening now though while I'm in the Uni Computer pool!).

Some links:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Indo-European
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Uralic_language
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Afro-Asiatic
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Afro-Asiatic
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages

Some of those links are purposefully not about proto-language families etc, but they still have interesting details - like Tocharian .