Introduction to Shemspreg

Shemspreg (shem ‘human’ + spreg ‘speak’) is a language which is derived from what has been reconstructed of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language for most of the languages of Europe and many of Western and Southern Asia. Proto-Indo-European was spoken somewhere in Eurasia approximately 6000 years ago, although it is not clear exactly where or if it was a single, homogeneous speech community. Shemspreg is not intended to be a faithful reproduction of Proto-Indo-European but is rather a fanciful derivation of it. In creating Shemspreg, I have taken certain liberties in all aspects of grammar; this has been done for two reasons: (i) to reflect my personal æsthetic in language structure and design, and (ii) to simplify and regularize the complexities of Proto-Indo-European, a motivation ultimately related to (i). Shemspreg has been constructed solely for the pleasure of its construction; I have no plans to advertise or promote Shemspreg as an international auxiliary language. In the chapters which follow, I provide brief descriptions of the sounds of Shemspreg, nouns, pronouns and other particles, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and sentence structure. There are also three appendices which deal with additional matter. The first appendix lays out the principles used in adapting PIE reconstructions for use in Shemspreg. The second appendix contains some short texts with interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and some notes on interesting grammatical constructions. The final appendix is a glossary of linguistic terms used in this description.