The king and the god

The king and the god () is the title of a short dialogue composed in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. It is loosely based on the "King Harishchandra" episode of Aitareya Brahmana (7.14). S. K. Sen asked a number of Indo-Europeanists (Y. E. Arbeitman, Eric P. Hamp, Manfred Mayrhofer, Jaan Puhvel, Werner Winter, Winfred P. Lehmann) to reconstruct the PIE "parent" of the text.

Dialogue
Hamp's/Sen's version from the EIEC (1997:503), which differs from Hamp's original version in replacing Hamp's Lughus with Sen's Werunos:

Winfred P. Lehmann's version


The EIEC spelling largely corresponds to that used in the Proto-Indo-European language article, with ' for ' and ' for unspecified laryngeals '. Lehmann attempts to give a more phonetical rendering, with (voiceless velar fricative) for ' and  (glottal stop) for '. Further differences include Lehmann's avoidance of the augment, and of the palato-alveolars as distinctive phonemes. Altogether, Lehmann's version can be taken as the reconstruction of a slightly later period, after contraction for example of earlier ' to ', say of a Centum dialect, that has also lost (or never developed) the augment. However, the differences in reconstructions are more probably due to differences in theoretical viewpoint. The EIEC spelling is a more direct result of the reconstruction process, while having typologically too many marked features to be a language really spoken some time in that form, whereas Lehmann represents the position to attain the most probable natural language to show up in reconstruction the way PIE is.

Andrew Byrd's version
Linguist Andrew Byrd has produced and recorded his own translation to reconstructed PIE.



English translation:


 * Once there was a king. He was childless. The king wanted a son. He asked his priest: "May a son be born to me!" The priest said to the king: "Pray to the god Werunos." The king approached the god Werunos to pray now to the god. "Hear me, father Werunos!" The god Werunos came down from heaven. "What do you want?" "I want a son." "Let this be so," said the bright god Werunos. The king's lady bore a son.