Note: this is mostly an automatic transcription, lightly edited and corrected. Punctuation and formatting are not perfect.

Marcie: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Endless Knot Podcast,

Aven: where the more we know,

Marcie: the more we want to find out

Aven: tracing serendipitous connections through our lives

Marcie: and across disciplines.

Aven: Hi, I'm Aven.

Marcie: And I'm Marcie

Aven: And today we're learning our ABCs. We'll be speaking to Danny Bate.

Marcie: Dr. Danny Bate is a linguist writer, public speaker, and podcaster from the uk, and currently is based in the Czech Republic. He has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and his debut book, why Q Needs You was published in the UK at the start of October, 2025 It is a linguistical historical nonfiction book for a general audience.

Aven: It sets out to answer two big questions. Where did we get the letters of the alphabet from and why does English use them so strangely? We had a delightful conversation about the book, his podcast, [00:01:00] Indo-European, and of course cats. Woohoo. One side note, we still haven't got our audio set up quite right, so this has some blips for which we apologize.

We'll get there. I hope so. Enjoy.

So, hi Danny. Welcome to the podcast.

We're really glad to have you and glad to have you as in some ways the triumphant return, we hope of our podcast. I'm sure this episode will be triumphant. We're just hoping that we can manage the return part of it and keep going.

Marcie: I, I've been, you know, just sort of selfishly wanting to have a good chat with you for a long time, so this is, this is my way of making that happen.

Yeah.

Danny Bate: I'll do my best. Hopefully I can give you a good show and, make the return contribute to its triumph as well. And I have to admit, Marcie, it is like being in one of your videos at the moment. It is during your voices little spooky, and it's just

Aven: Thank you. well, we will start, we will of course turn to [00:02:00] your book very soon, but we'll start with our traditional first question that we ask our guests. Which is tell us about an unexpected connection in your life, whether in your work, your research, your writing, your hobbies, anything you'd like.

We just, we're always in search of unexpected connections.

Danny Bate: Yeah, so this is quite tricky for me. I do have to admit because, uh, there are many connections that have cropped up in my life that I'm very, very proud of and have meant, uh, a great deal to me. But one does seem so good that I have to share it, and it does seem a little, it spooks me out. A little bit which is that I come from the uk, from Southern England originally, and I was immersed in history from a very early age.

It mattered to my parents, and so it matters to me. In particular, it was, ancient history and medieval history where I grew up. the part of the UK is a county known as Norfolk. and it's crammed full of medieval history. There's no shortage of flint stone churches and, uh, a couple of cathedrals and, old buildings and things like that.

And one of the things [00:03:00] that absolutely fueled my love for medieval history like, you know. catnip to a cat was actually a, a, a series of murder mysteries known as the Cadfael Chronicles. People who love medieval history, um, may be familiar with them, they're great. Uh, they all revolve around this crime solving Benedictine monk brother Cadfael And, uh, my introduction to this, uh, to this world, uh, was actually a TV series. A TV series in the 1990s, uh, with Sir Derek Jacoby as in, in the starring role. but there's also a book, there's, there's a series of books that the TV series is based on, written by Ellis Peters. Ellis Peters was a pseudonym, a nom de plume for, Edith Pargeter And she, for all intents and purposes, seemed to be a very, very English crime writer who lived and worked and, and wrote about Shropshire and Shrewsbury, which is in the west of England. And that was basically all that she was to me. And I think for most people in the uk, a fantastic writer who wrote a great series of [00:04:00] books, that are beloved by medieval history fans, and was then turned into a popular TV series.

But then. Through a series of, accidents or coincidences, I find out that she has this, alter ego or other string to her bow which is as a massive Bohemaphile a Czechophile She was extremely, uh, devoted to all things. Czech like me, the route by which we came to our appreciation for all things, uh, Czech and Moravian and Slovakian.

It was different of course, for, Edith Pargeter It's because of the war. And basically, uh, a series of, historical events that lead her to getting stuck into, what becomes communist Czechoslovakia. But this is enormously important to me because I too have got stuck into the Czech Republic.

it's where I'm speaking to you today. It's where I live. And so the fact that this writer whose books I adored also was a committed Czechophile she loved the country. She was doing her bit to, uh, raise awareness and support the country from a distance. [00:05:00] She visited a few times.

Uh, this. Became very difficult under communism. but uh, she got her knowledge of the Czech language up to such a good level from a distance that she could even translate Czech works into English. And so she became a conduit for raising awareness of, fantastic Czech literature. And so this was amazing.

This was an incredible, uh, joy for me to discover this. Second part of of the life of an author that I I love very much. I still watch and read the Cadfael Chronicles to this day. And so whereas Norfolk defines my youth and growing up in that medieval environment, the Czech Republic defines my adulthood.

And in both parts of my life there is Ellis Peters or Edith Pargeter And I just love that.

Aven: Oh wow. That's a totally awesome connection. I love Ellis Peters. We both do, obviously, we both love CAD Fail. We've watched them for ages. I've read all the books,

but I also love the stuff she writes as Edith Parter. It's fabulous. The [00:06:00] modern stuff.

I don't know. There's something about the way she writes. Anyway. Love it. And that's such a great connection and totally unexpected.

Yeah, I think it's symptomatic of the way we like to think about the world and what our podcast and your videos are about, Marcie, which is The way there's a web of connection between all sorts of things. You just mm-hmm. You have no reason to understand how everything is so connected and how much wider that web is until you start pulling on a thread, whether that's a thread.

You move to a new country, and so suddenly you notice everything that's connected to that country, or you start researching it or whatever. you pull the thread and then you see how far it goes.

Danny Bate: Oh yes, absolutely. Gosh. my knowledge of this country was not good before I moved here, and especially

Where I met

my,

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: then girlfriend, later fiance, now wife. and I remember meeting her and thinking that she was very pretty and wanting to make a good impression. And she tells me that she's from the Czech Republic and I don't know much about that country and I don't know what to say in that [00:07:00] situation. But through her I have become fully immersed in this country and to a level that is constantly interesting insatiably, interesting and, and nourishing to me how much I got stuck into this country because it offers me a different perspective and another launchpad into connections and into the past and especially the linguistic past, which is what I like to do.

Because the connections really are there. Europe and its, many countries are not these individual jigsaw pieces that are entirely separate. The borders are important, but they are by no means the whole story and the connections ignore the borders in many cases and go far beyond them. And it's constantly interesting in being Sat here in the middle of Europe is is a great education.

Marcie: And of course, you know, language is an inherently very connected sort of thing. The story of the alphabet is a story about, you know, a chain of connections.

Aven: Mm-hmm. Yeah. But before we trace, that particular one maybe we'll just start a little bit more with some [00:08:00] background. Your background, Danny? Mm-hmm.

Marcie: So how did you get into linguistics?

Danny Bate: Yeah. It's a very natural question, and just like with my connection, I have to be a little bit hesitant because it's. Not particularly obvious. There must have been a time when I wasn't interested in linguistics. I wasn't born with this obsession. But at the same time, it was something that developed slowly and developed in such a way that I didn't know that it existed and that my interests collectively had a name for a few years.

Definitely built up while I was a teenager at school, a secondary school in the uk. And I had a couple of just brilliant modern foreign language teachers who recognized something in me. And a lot of that is just frankly down to luck. It's a huge sliding doors moment that My surname is Bate, I was sat towards the front of the class seated alphabetically. I was closer to the teacher proximity wise, and he could recognize me. He could recognize that I [00:09:00] was really interested in the languages. I, it really struck a chord with me, even perhaps before I realized this.

But of course it wasn't. The cool stuff that you could do with language is it wasn't, for example, the foreign experiences that you could have through French or through German. it was the grammar verb tables, paradigms, that sort of thing that appealed to this 14-year-old at the front of the class. So I really got into it but I would definitely say that there was maybe a three or four year lag, a delay before I realized that there was an intersection of all my interests. And that intersection had a name and that name was linguistics. So I did take a little bit of a leap of faith signing up for linguistics at university.

I signed up to do a bachelor's

of York

Aven: mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: completely the right decision. Day one, lecture one, yes, this is for me. So from there, it's just snowballed into the topic that defines my life. Degree, master's degree, PhD. And here I am trying to make a career outta linguistics.

Aven: [00:10:00] Yeah. I think that that experience of not even knowing it's a field Must happen to a lot of people in linguistics, but also I think that's a, a more common experience than some people may realize. And I think it's, sometimes very much down to luck that we find our way to them.

Danny Bate: Yes. Especially in the modern day and age in which linguistics

represented, I've argued

that it's

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: a kind of golden age in non-academic circles. It on luck on right

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: or the right tweet, showing up on your and hooking you and it being

good

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: Good material that that raises your interest.

But to begin with, understandably so, when you're a child and an early teenager, you just dunno what's out there. And I would only just add that you have so many media as well, and that I

would say

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: public linguistics is doing arguably better than academic linguistics. but nonetheless it is still present in some kinds of

than in others.

your kind

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: media as it gets called, so [00:11:00] that's your, tv for example, TV and radio. really there. Like we

haven't

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: for example, I was getting most of my information from the BB, C, there was basically nothing that resembled

So you just

didn't

Aven: Mm. Mm-hmm. Again, down to luck. Yeah.

Marcie: and it really, you're right, it really is a sort of golden age for public. Academic work. Especially in linguistics in particular. There are so many, great podcasts and YouTube channels and books, social media posts about linguistics.

Aven: Mm-hmm. That's positive. I don't wanna be negative, but a lot of those people are trained in systems that are no longer offering those courses. Yeah. Which is really, really upsetting. I feel that about classics too, right? Mm-hmm. Like there's a, there's a real burgeoning of online social public facing classics, but all of the programs are being cut.

So where is the next generation of public facing scholars going to come from? But anyway,

Danny Bate: from me. It's

Aven: Yeah, I know.

Danny Bate: exciting and and [00:12:00] equal measure.

Aven: Yes.

Okay, so on that note, what did you do for your degree? Tell us more about the PhD. Well, I mean your undergrad and, and master's if you want, but I'm particularly interested your PhD. You've finished it fairly, relatively recently, I think. And, we'd love to hear more about that.

Danny Bate: Of course, it is still somewhat fresh. The PhD I wrapped up in 2024. So it's still feels pretty fresh, uh, in my mind as an experience, and I loved it. I should say. It was a very happy time for me despite the ongoing global plague that was the time, made things a little

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: But there is actually, there's a complete through line through all of my three academic degrees in that it was in the, uh, bachelor stage that I started to identify what I, especially like what makes my heart sing within linguistics. And that's partly because of the strength of the York course It was just structured in such a way that you could really experience the full breadth of linguistics and all its different sub-disciplines. Everything from psycholinguistics [00:13:00] to language acquisition and you get a taste of them and you get, great teaching from great scholars and eventually over a couple of years you'd have to choose what you were going to specialize in. And for me it was all about syntax. I remained just delighted by word order and especially as a subject where it was very logical. It was very neat. I loved the kind of predictive models and theories of syntax. But. It's this aspect of our language that really gets no attention whatsoever.

It's very common, say in public linguistics to think about etymology and, and words, because I suppose words are obvious. We have seen or heard a word, arguably, we've never seen any syntax. It's this invisible thing strings things together. But in my

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: would never, ever do anything that was remotely relevant or uh useful for today in linguistics because I quickly realized that I could combine

history, which I've

loved

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: It's been just part of me and something that my parents instilled in [00:14:00] me very early on So I focused on historical syntax, that's the word, order of historical languages and also word order time.

pursued

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: master's degree which in the UK just one year. That was the case for

really honing in on comparative historical syntax So taking the word order of a large group of languages and comparing it and seeing how they might actually be related that their syntax might be due to some sort of common ancestor that was very much explicitly the theme of my PhD.

So what can we say about the word order of a language that's so old? we don't have any direct

it. It's a prehistoric

language

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: Proto-Indo-European and I was maybe unusual among PhD students in the UK you have to submit a plan proposal for what you're gonna do and I did it I just completed it. Normally it's, and I say that not in a kind of a mocking way, [00:15:00] it's just absolutely fine for you to think, oh, this doesn't work. That does work, this doesn't work. And maybe change tack over the course of the PhD But in my case, the original idea was good enough that I could see it through to the very end.

And now I have some thoughts, academically grounded thoughts about the word order of Proto-Indo-European. There you go.

Marcie: And that, that's, that's a topic that, to me just sort of boggles the mind like we can very clearly see the traces of the words mm-hmm. The phonology and theology by, you know, the daughter languages. But it's, it's like doubly intangible, the syntax. It's, it seems like a, a mad, mad, fascinating thing to try and tackle

Danny Bate: Yeah, so part one of the first chapter of the thesis

Aven: the mad, fascinating thing I'm trying to do.

Danny Bate: exactly So and other people and

Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: it's not mad and that it's something that you can attempt but you really need think hard. That's ideal in

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: but you need to identify what do you mean [00:16:00] and a working definition of of syntax So my syntax my word order as a modern English speaker is very much like that of my parents There. Basically no obvious discrepancies between the way I string words

the way that they do. Likewise,

Aven: Right.

Danny Bate: obvious differences between my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents.

It all seems fine. So there is some kind of inheritance in a linguistic sense going on where word order is being passed down the generations. And if you can hone in on what exactly is being passed down, the generations be very specific Not just vague patterns but specific. entities or specific rules that have some kind of substance.

Then you can make a case for following that back through the millennia, back to some kind of proto language and I believe I did that I dunno I've managed I dunno only about 10 people have read the thesis. I don't think I have to convince too many people

Aven: So the details are gonna be quite technical and we [00:17:00] probably don't have space to fully discuss your entire thesis.

But can you give an example of like one core type of structure, if I'm understanding correctly, that you might use as a, Telltale mark of inheritance? When I think of syntax and historical syntax and defense between word order in, in languages as a, you know, relatively educated non-specialist, I think about things like subject verb order or where your prepositions go or where your modifiers go more generally with relation to the nouns that they modify, things like that.

How your clauses fit together, how causes demonstrated. That's the not, very technical way that I'm thinking about it. Is there something on that level of sophistication that you can tell us about?

Danny Bate: A hundred percent. Absolutely. And the

things that you've

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: there are absolutely the right topics to be honing in on it's just a kind of accident that these happen to be actually really complicated to to trace back through the centuries There aspects of word order that seem so solid and dependable in [00:18:00] English for example, the relative position of subjects, verbs and objects they tend to go in that order S-O-S-V-O So I saw the cat the cat ate the pizza something like that. Don't feed pizza to your cats. But strangely enough as you go back in time these things get quite muddled and they do seem to be uh tremendously flexible in earlier stages of English and also earlier stages of other indoor European languages, the family to which English belongs to the extent that not only is the word order of the historic and prehistoric stages quite hard to pin down because it's so flexible. I actually have made the kind of sub argument that the categories of subject and object are themselves not useful. When you go that far back in time that they're just not relevant aspects of the grammar and it becomes harder and harder as you go back through, say, Latin or ancient Greek or Sanskrit or Hitite.

It becomes harder and harder to talk about subjects and objects [00:19:00] and that these are terms that bundle together different features and those features kind of separate out as you follow them into the myths of prehistory. And so much so that I think that's topics So things which are known information, things which uh you and your audience both recognize and a a topicality is part of a subject that's kinda bundled into subjects as we use them for English but a kind of single subject hood is, it becomes very hard to identify. So that's a an annoying academic answer where I can't say anything concrete becomes just difficult. Something Actually that much more concrete and does seem to have survived the centuries relatively unchanged, is the fact that in English and a whole host of other languages, we overwhelmingly tend to put our question words first in the

So we'll say things

Aven: Yep.

Danny Bate: only who are you but also what do you like?

are we meeting what

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: you know where are you going That sort of thing [00:20:00] We put words first.

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: is not something that you can. Take for granted. Not all

that. And there are, for example,

later modern Indo-European languages that have developed away from that and that don't do this. But that does seem to be an aspect of the family that has really survived since not the earliest stage that we know about, but a pretty early stage. I've made the case that after the kind of speakers of languages that will become Anatolian Anatolian, so that's Hitite and that whole gang, after they've gone on their way, the whole rule of putting your question words first gets set up So it's there in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit the Germanic languages the Celtic language is a pretty strong feature. So that's the sort of thing that we really have you know inherited down the generations

Aven: Very cool. and I immediately thought of Latin, the net interrogative, but that's a sub. I mean, they, they use their question words at the beginning of their sentences or their clauses, but they also have a way, like you say, it's not, it's [00:21:00] not a given because there's actually another way in Latin too,

Danny Bate: I

Aven: That's really interesting. Yeah.

Danny Bate: worry,

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: in the thesis big time

because

Aven: I'm sure it does. Yeah.

Danny Bate: it's not first in the sentence but it's second And that's, again, not something you can take for granted. You can have languages, I believe Mandarin Chinese as one of them where you actually put an equivalent question particle

the

So again, not something

that

Aven: Right.

Danny Bate: given.

Aven: It's interesting when you think, you know, when writing systems are developed you have the opportunity for an additional marker of a question.

Mm-hmm. Which in English we put at the end but it can be put at the beginning or at the beginning and the end. Mm-hmm. Depending on what language you're talking about. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: Absolutely.

Spanish being perhaps the most

famous

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: this, and arguably, I think the Spanish system has logic to it in that what we're

Aven: yeah.

Danny Bate: is indicating some a question status and also question intonation. And a question. Intonation is not something that, just the final word of the[00:22:00]

over the entire

sentence and

Aven: Right.

Danny Bate: so that, if I'm gonna ask a question it might end up sounding like this, and then the

higher and higher.

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: So the Spanish

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: sense to

Aven: let's talk more about writing and punctuation. Let's talk about your book. So it's great. Just for the record, just to start off with that,

Marcie: let me just preface by saying I, really like this book, and one of the things that I really like about it is that you don't talk down to your audience.

You Yeah. You take the time to explain things and rather than just kind of dumbing it down or something. which is why I think this book is great, both for people who know nothing about the topic to people who are already mm-hmm. Knowledgeable about language. it's got enough sophistication that, yeah, it's enough sophistication for that.

So I think you pitched this absolutely right.

Danny Bate: Thank you very much That's exactly what I was always hoping for when I was writing for it. So

Aven: right at the beginning when you say like, I'm gonna use linguistic terms, I'm gonna use technical terms. I was like, [00:23:00] thank you. Because I understand, of course, jargon scares people, but, jargon exists because it's precise and it means what you need it to mean in the case that you're using it in.

And you should try to not overuse it. Sure. But the circum of attempting to used plain language, when there's one term that means the same thing sometimes drives me a little crazy. And I, that's not calling out any, you know, public scholars who are very careful about their lack of, too many terminology.

You know, there's lots of different ways of doing this, and you can take people to the same end in different ways. But if I'm going to have to read a whole book, it is nice for me to be able to read with the terms that I know and I'm pretty familiar with. And not to sort of. Re-explaining of it every time, so I appreciated that.

Danny Bate: you that that.

was very important to me from the beginning, that just to,

the reader up to

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: new concepts, new ways of thinking. And the precision of jargon is not not just a benefit in terms of word count.

[00:24:00] is

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: if you choose to go down the sort of non jargon route, you can often

water. You can lay

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: in that you could explain something in a kind of imprecise way that then

later

Aven: Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: and you have go through the motions again Whereas if

you

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: term and couch it in explanation, then you can refer back to that and say, oh, remember when we encountered this

this chapter, a few pages

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: There are some people who in their excellent books aimed at a general audience, will try to avoid things.

For example, like using,

or using a standard set

Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: they have

much

They have to do so

much more

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: say

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: is the B sound this is

this, or as in that. And

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: They may despite wanting

Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: It's a minefield

It's a

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: you say that I've managed to walk through the minefield. then thank you

very

Marcie: and for the [00:25:00] listeners, there is also a glossary, so, you know, if you forget a term that was used a ways back, just head to the glossary and you're set.

Aven: yeah, we don't wanna make it sound like it's intimidating at all 'cause it's absolutely not an intimidating book.

But, yeah. Phonology is one, is the trickiest one in particular and I'm not good at reading IPA, like it's not, I'm not natural with it because I, I'm not a linguist and I wasn't trained in it, so I have to sit and think about it and sometimes look it up or whatever. But on the other hand, accents, man, they interfere with every single attempt to explain a sound, ever.

Every time I read something about people talking about language and, and sounds, and they try to avoid IPA for understandable reasons, it gets into such quick sand.

Danny Bate: Oh

Aven: fast.

Danny Bate: I know Oh, two to write for a slightly less international language, which doesn't have so many accents. It doesn't have

countries that all

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: English in different ways.

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: frankly if I could write for the checks in Czech

and checks, you know of them [00:26:00] in terms of number of

Aven: mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: And generally the pronunciation is

There's a standard pronunciation that

Aven: Mm-hmm. yeah.

Danny Bate: there'd be whole sections of that book where I would sweat and strain over identifying the particular sound of, say a letter in antiquity omega the Greek letter Omega,

Aven: mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: actually had then I would briefly in parentheses afterwards, put as in the English word law, and then I'd, continue merrily on my way And so much of the process of editing was coming back to things like as in the English word law, and adding a single word My English

Aven: This word? Yeah.

Writing anything about for, uh, a New Zealander in Londoner Southern English and a Newfoundlander. And you just try and then someone in India? Yeah. As if,

Danny Bate: I suppose even that

I'm

Aven: yeah.

Danny Bate: that I

degree of privilege in that I

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: in a kind of [00:27:00] English that if not is the most populous accent of English,

known. So

Aven: Yes.

Danny Bate: maybe get away with that. Even if I don't, if I say something like in as in my pronunciation of law, which is not now the most

way to pronounce that

letter it

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: As in in America and Canada the court court merger it now vow

Aven: Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah.

Danny Bate: that because people are exposed if they've watched Harry

Aven: Yeah,

Danny Bate: or

something like that. Whereas somebody

Aven: yeah.

Danny Bate: Zealander Saying things like oh as in my pronunciation of pin, which they mean

the writing

Aven: Yeah, exactly. No one. Yeah. Unless you have a very particular viewing habit

and you really like tini,

you're not gonna get it.

Danny Bate: If

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: the entirety of the film what we do in the shadows as I have that you're familiar with all of these sounds, but,

is it is difficult So

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: certain amount of privilege in this and [00:28:00] I am not complaining here but I will just say that all of these problems I've mentioned disappeared immediately I read the

Aven: Oh, right.

Danny Bate: they were they were in a moment replaced by the opposite problem in that, now I was talking about letters It's about the alphabet This book It's about on the page that I basically describe.

Aven: Right.

Danny Bate: Just in some sort of bizarre game of historical or archeological saying like describing hiogly thinking, oh no, I just want this chapter to be done.

What chapter is it? B. Oh, fantastic. Okay. 24 more to go.

Aven: Because yes, the book is filled with very nice, helpful drawings of mm-hmm. Like the reconstruction of the various visits of the alphabet. Very useful. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: Vanished in a second

Aven: Yeah.

Okay. So the book is about the alphabet and it's organized on a fairly obvious principle, which is you have one chapter per [00:29:00] letter of the alphabet of the English alphabet, current modern English alphabet. Sorry. You need a lot more caveats there. And that makes sense. And you tell the history of all the letters.

Marcie: So I have a first question. How did you come to the topic of the book? 'cause this is like a far cry from Proto-Indo-European. Yeah.

Danny Bate: Yeah, a very fair question. And I suppose it's a case of you know I guess you guys aren't ready for that but your kids are gonna love it sort of situation that I would love to write a book about syntax and I can at this stage say that a future book or future books plural will have a little bit of syntax stuff in them good stuff that people can really, you know get to grips with syntax of modern day English and But

not for the first book, not for a book that I hope would establish me as an as somebody who can communicate linguistics,

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: book would not exist at all without my lovely agent who is the whole motivation. He's the whole, reason for why it exists Because he [00:30:00] contacts me.

We have great deliberations over a cup of coffee in Edinburgh one time and it does become obvious very quickly that while I love to communicate. aspect of historical language, the syntax, the stuff that I was at that time completely immersed in is not going to sell. It's not sexy enough as a topic, and I get that. So what could it be? I mentioned at the beginning that syntax is this aspect of language that is pretty invisible. Most of us have never thought about and never encountered a syntactic rule. But alphabet is it is very visible

Aven: Hmm.

Danny Bate: so arguably than syntax because we tend to remember learning the

speech for those of us who

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: and use spoken language We learn all of that at a pre-conscious or pre remembering stage whereas uh the alphabet we do remember we have a a sense of uh learning our ABCs and consequently maybe grappling with some tricky aspects of it, but we learn it [00:31:00] successfully and then spend the rest of our lives not really thinking about it, which is great.

That shows that it works as a system. So honed in on the alphabet as a doorway into the subjects that I already cared about, but that could be packaged up and presented to people in a way that they cared about. Is a meeting something that they do and remember learning, but in completely a new light and through new eyes seemed to me like the perfect combination.

would've been December 2023.

Aven: Okay. So on the topic of like smuggling in other stuff you wanted to talk about, perhaps that's not the way you phrased it, but you've got the alphabet, you've organized it on that principle. But one of the things that could have happened is that it could become very repetitious. You're telling essentially the same, I mean, obviously there's a different story for every letter to some extent, but some of them, they all mostly follow the same sets of languages. They come from the same place except for, you know, there's a handful that don't. [00:32:00] But realistically, the story is similar for all of them.

And if you just tell that story, it's gonna become fairly repetitive. It is not. What are the other kinds of organizing principles of the book? Like are there other chunks or particular kinds of stories you were trying to get in?

Danny Bate: Absolutely. And avoiding repetitiveness was hugely important to me because I did want to provide a pleasant reading experience. And that did pose a challenge that I had to think about Maybe not in the ways that you might expect to provide a little bit more structure The book starts off uh with the first five chapters from A to E in a kind of skeletal history of the alphabet. So everything that gets you from its ultimate origins in chapter A through to modern English by the end of chapter E and I remain a little bit spooked by how well the first five letters of the alphabets suit to that structure. It was honestly spooky to me how this was possible And it's possible by accident. [00:33:00] There isn't a logic or a kind of historical reason for that. They just work really well So identifying that was a of inspiration a, moment of genius on my part I don't get too many but that matter to me very much that I could seize on the structure of the alphabet to tell that story to be precise chapter A, I dedicate to the Egyptians and to the Venetians basically the kind of the people whom we owe the alphabet to get the whole thing set up and that's perfect because A comes first And A kind of looks like the thing that it used to represent in those early days.

Capital A looks like the head of an ox, and that is what the letter was originally, and that's what it represented And that's the reason for how the letter got set up in the first place. Chapter B spends more time with the Greeks. And that's great because b or beta to the Greeks has changed in its pronunciation over the years So it's gone from a b sound to a V sound. And that's really great for introducing the whole concept of sound change, which is my bread and butter as a historical linguist. But actually it's not [00:34:00] that recognizable

a lot of people. Chapter C.

the story further into ancient Italy. And again, c is as a letter is a legacy of one particular ancient Italian civilization who the etruscans basically they they take the Greek letter Gamma and they continue the shape of the letter but they do change its sound. So it goes from a g sound gamma to a K sound as in, I dunno, cook as it is in English today. So I introduce the Etruscans introduce the Romans DI spend a little bit of time in kind of post Roman writing, and then E is for English, that's the kind of potted history of English and Consequently, chapter E is by far the most ambitious of all the chapters trying to cram in Alfred the great, and the wanderer and, Beowulf along with the Norman conquest and the great vowel shift. You Little stuff that just needs to be sprinkled in there from time to time but while I'm very happy that by the end of Chapter E I've been able to tell the story and that it suits the alphabet, so well, I have now got to think [00:35:00] of something else because I've told the story I need to carry on from f onwards, and I chose really to go in a kind of portrait by portrait or biography by biography way in that the following chapters are much more standalone. And they do they they do very much tell stories that are specific to that particular letter. Not so many of them tell stories that pertain to the alphabet in general, but some do. So I use, for example, chapter MM you know for money to tell what is the logic behind the alphabet letters The names the names of the letters. right So Y are they called that. And m is just a nice way into that. I use Chapter N to talk about why we double up constant letters so much in English, why we spell better with two T's or uh I don't know um well with two Ls So it's not as if each chapter by that point is a kind of standalone story.

I am doing my best to build up our knowledge or the reader's knowledge of the alphabet, but it was definitely a [00:36:00] challenge for me personally. Perhaps the biggest challenge. To write all of that. And I had enough material, I had enough material to write something at least for every single chapter and keep it to their similar page count. But then to finish all of that and look back and try and find the threads, try and identify the lines that do go through all of the chapters from A to Zed or Z right at the very end. And that took time absolutely say hand on heart that there were big picture points that are woven through all of the chapters that I really had not grasped before writing this book.

And even after writing this book And I had to think about it just like the plane was in the air. But I needed to stick the landing, and that was the epilogue and the epilogue, while I swear by it I am proud of that piece of writing. There are still things, still really powerful forces behind writing and speech that I was still [00:37:00] grasping at, even by the end of writing this book.

And And that's okay I just continue to learn as the book's author

Marcie: Yeah. I mean, it is interesting how the writing process is a way of, learning in itself. Mm-hmm. Which is, you know, something I always tell students, like writing isn't just communicating. It's a way of thinking. Mm-hmm. and of course, you know, thanks to that nameless individual who put the alphabet in the order that it is now anticipating that thousands of years later, you would need those first five letters to, adequately tell the story. It's, remarkable.

Danny Bate: Absolutely

Aven: in terms of those, like big picture things so the ones that you know, leapt out to me were basic principles of language change writ small and large. So like phonetic changes, but also larger questions around, the socio political reasons that languages change. And, you know, talking about conquest and other lots of different forces.

So all the way through you've got different versions of those stories and how language changes. Obviously etymology is in it sprinkled all the way through because how could it not? And you've got the [00:38:00] history spelling as a concept, but also the slander against English for being so poorly spelled and so ridiculous I feel like was underpinning it.

And you really come to that. The epilogue in particular. what else am I leaving out in terms of things that you identified as, connecting threads things you really wanted to kind of get across through it?

Danny Bate: Yeah I really appreciate that I think you have identified the the main themes or the themes that. uh became very important to me by the end of

process. I

did from the outset want to tell the story not only of the alphabet, but also. of English spelling in general so the way that English

But I

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: of that I just didn't expect by the end of the process. I didn't expect, for example, how much of a hesitant or reluctant defender. Of English spelling I was going to

the end of

In that I

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: want to make the point that it's not perfect, but a, imperfections are [00:39:00] historically inevitable b, no writing system is perfect. No writing system gets it absolutely spot on for whatever modality of language it's trying to write down. there are many ways of doing this. There are many principles of writing where you are gonna take something in speech and encoded in some way. It doesn't have to be sounds It can also be meaning where you're taking the meaning of individual bits of language and writing that down instead as a basis. And you can combine these principles. So kinda most famously, Chinese writing combines these two principles in that um Chinese characters have a meaningful quality or feature and also a phonetic feature as well. that they are spelling syllables in a weird way by historical accent that's kind of English as well There are other principles at play in English in that sounds are still the basis. I think it still can be argued to be a phonemic writing system to spell the phonemes of English. [00:40:00] If that is your single target, then yeah, it's doing a terrible job at that. But that's partly because of sound change and sounds do change. In a way that really does not come naturally to writing. Writing can easily start to lag behind. But weirdly when that lag develops, other principles can come into play. made the case very briefly in the book It's not a major topic, but it's in there that of the oddities of English spelling, yeah, they don't match up to the sounds of the language, but they do match up to say the meaning. Of the language, the silent letter that you might find in so many words I don't know the k at the start of to know and knowledge and things like that is almost like a unit of meaning.

It makes NOW into a single thing that we recognize in no knowledge, act knowledge. But that also we know to be separate in meaning and also pronunciation from now, NOW. there

things very organically going

[00:41:00] on

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: and we recognize them. We intuit these things.

We read, text on a page not as simple sequences or sounds, but sounds plus meaning as well.

as adults, after the

initial

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: So all of these things are going on behind the system behind the scenes as a system and we understand them So there is also the reflective aspect of the book as well. I want people to grasp just how great they are at language. And if I'm getting a little bit emotional here, it's because I am, I'm very tired people berating themselves or berating others.

go hand in hand about

bad

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: of language.

And

we can

Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: we can have those different disagreements. Let's say that you've set up a standard standards, have their downsides, they have their upsides as well. They are complicated kind of political things, these standard languages. But from the linguistic perspective, it's like A collection of geniuses arguing amongst themselves.

That's how we humans [00:42:00] look

in that. All of

the

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: think about, the way that we spell, the way that we speak, the way that we understand meaning, so good

that it doesn't

become a kind of elite speaking down to some sort of subclass who can't do language properly.

No, it just becomes a conversation among elite users of language. So that was important to me. And that's I hope that's in there in the book

Marcie: Yeah. I definitely agree with, your defense of the spelling system. I wonder what purpose would it even, what would be the actual utility of it anyways? I mean, yes, it will help you maybe write things down, but as you say, it doesn't help you read.

Certainly not once you're a skilled reader. You don't sound every word out. So only at the very early stages do you, do you need it for that? So what would spelling reform do? What would spelling reform do? Yeah.

Danny Bate: All Yeah.

Yeah. have technology that's taken a lot of the computation outta the picture for [00:43:00] us. We have our spell checkers predictive text for example AI as well, which is doing the thinking for us and now spellings, for so many people for so many instances of their day. Spelling now really does become. Units of meaning, chunks of meaning that just happen to look like they're composed of smaller sounds and smaller letters for sounds. But actually what we're doing is we are, because we don't need to sound them out. We uh don't send them out when we read And we are not sending them out when we write as well. They're just becoming blocks of

a page. So

there

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: to it as well but of course at the same time I'm gonna be very academically equivocal about this there are benefits

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: to reform of spelling I've. made the argument that there are smaller bits of housekeeping and tidying up that we

English spelling that we could be open to.

Aven: Right?

Danny Bate: We don't need the H We really don't

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: been pronounced It contributes nothing I think [00:44:00] it's one of the few silent letters that genuinely is

silent in that it contributes

nothing

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: of the word and the encoding of the word in speech. So we can be open to that We can get rid of the B in debt and doubt, and they continue to work with the systems of English spelling. So there is that element too. But a wholesale reform of spelling I honestly feel that the ship has kind of

Aven: literally, I think that's literally true. It's because of all the ships sailing that it is never coming back.

Sorry to step in. Yeah,

Danny Bate: you can have a situation like what we've got here in the Czech Republic where you have an institution that kind of gets to dictate

should be. this

institution

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: of things going for it in its favor. One is that it's prestigious and people give it

They listen to it as an organization.

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: spelling reforms might get implemented, but

not that old and

the

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: spelling reform that. [00:45:00] Really set the tone for standard Czech spelling

long ago, so

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: hasn't had that long to diverge. There are maybe a couple of discrepancies, but really not many as a language, but it's all it's all happening really around the year 1800 to 1850. whereas with English, I would say the wind of opportunity. Where you've got people who are prestigious enough technology to implement the standard reform and a kind of organic state of English spelling that's not too far away from speech. me, I would place that kind of golden window at maybe the year 1400 to 1600, arguably maybe 17th century as well but afterwards it all the language disintegrates English is shipped abroad. you don't have the institutions that are being listened to Things like the Oxford English dictionary are pretty influential, but they don't get to set the tone for the entire English language we would need some sort of supernational organization now that the United States, [00:46:00] Canada, the uk, Ireland, India New Zealand South Africa and Australia are for whatever reason able to listen to And then we've somehow got a.

that

to set

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: for

Aven: Hmm.

Danny Bate: speech.

Aven: Yep.

Danny Bate: don't wanna be optimistic, but I honestly now cannot see how a standard English that we all agreed upon could now be created and reformed so that all of these very valid factors are appeased and are satisfied. I just can't see now how that would And I would take it a step further if this does happen individually. we go for some sort of national reform of spelling where it's on a country by country basis, that could happen. I think we'd have to see a real kind of political geopolitical reset in the world let's say that happens and you get American spelling, Australian spelling, and we see a much bigger divergence. Think that's the end of the I don't think by that point in time you

have an English language anymore. You have maybe English languages or indeed an Ang [00:47:00] family

And

that's

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: think that standard spelling is more or less the one thing, keeping the English language together at this

Aven: You could call that a dividing like that would, that would be the point at which you'd mark the ever contentious division between a dialect and a language, right? You'd say, well, okay. The minute they started recognizing it in writing, as that distinctly divergent, that they needed their own systems of spelling for it, that's it.

Now we've got a Danish Swedish going on here,

Danny Bate: Yeah

Aven: Or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Danny Bate: languages which emerge

Aven: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Danny Bate: and there's a two step process going on there. It's one thing for a language and for a family of languages to emerge, it's a second thing for it to be

and for

people

Aven: Yeah. Yeah.

Danny Bate: I've made the case that the romance languages began in the ninth century because that was the first time anybody noticed,

the that these are now

separate languages their own spelling as well.

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: and spelling could be key to that kind of recognition whereas previously you can let speech [00:48:00] on in the background.

and if honestly not to put too finer point on it I don't think the Latin

Aven: I think that's pretty close. Yeah. Yeah.

Danny Bate: English spelling wouldn't go anywhere. It'd still be used, we'd still read it in the same way that down the

to read Latin. But

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: would lose its position as top dog and new languages and new spellings

Aven: Because it would no longer match what you would recognize more clearly that it doesn't match what you say. Yeah.

Marcie: you'd have to imagine a situation in which, different national varieties became so distinct in the spoken language first. That it made sense to then reflect that in the written language.

And it's hard to imagine that happening with mass media the way it is today,

Aven: though. I would argue that there are times when I literally cannot understand what a New Zealander is saying because of the vowels being so strongly shifted. Like obviously I'm, we all have our context clues we all like, but you know, a fairly short couple of sentences, I can be completely lost their [00:49:00] pronunciation has, has changed enough and, you know, throw in some vocabulary and some, you know, other stuff too. But the pronunciation has changed enough. But neither of us think of that as being a different language because obviously it isn't. And because we can both, well, what I'm trying to say is this thing, let me write it down.

We can both recognize the word, but if we did start, if we tomorrow started rewriting them and I wrote them with what I consider the vowel to be in, we chose our own new vowels, let's say. I think they would very quickly look like they were different languages. I think Denny, you're very right that it's like the self-perception because of course, because we perceive it as the same language.

We keep, there's a, there's a gravity that pulls us back towards, right. A center of trying whatever that center is. But of trying to like find that mutual intelligibility and make sure that we don't drift too far apart because we see ourselves as being in the same language. Whereas, for instance, someone who speaks Singlish or something isn't trying to be mutually intelligible with English.

Right? And so it can diverge further every day because. They don't see themselves as speaking English in the [00:50:00] same way. And so that, divergence is, much less leashed in mm-hmm. And the spelling system, I think you're right, like the written system is a real part of that, like very, very strong, obviously the anglosphere and political connections out too, but, but the spelling system is a really strong part of that,

Danny Bate: I agree I really do And I really like that point about,

for example, that there

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: as there is in everything that we

in this,

Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: say, a Singlish speaker and you don't have this external pressure or internal unconscious desire to be identified as an English speaker, the

happen much more naturally

and And

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: in spelling So I would argue

that

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: ish speakers are much less likely to maintain archaic spelling.

English

Aven: This, why would they?

Danny Bate: indeed

Aven: Right.

Danny Bate: same goes as well for

of English that are

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: have the same [00:51:00] identity. This may be an identity

to race.

Ethnicity nationality All of these factors come into play where you have what are largely known that are

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: descendants of English, but because of human factors of human identity, the pressure to maintain the spelling is not there. And consequently, we see a great divergence. They're thinking, this is not English. What I'm speaking is not English, and I don't care that it's not English. I'm like, I'm happy for it to be called Jamaican Creole or Jamaican

or something like that

I'm

Jamaican

Aven: Hmm

Danny Bate: so

Aven: mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: element going on in the background and it's those that we really see that the spelling has been Really that we

see

Aven: Yeah. Yeah.

Danny Bate: Whereas in Australia, in South Africa, these are populations who are still living with perhaps a legacy of empire colonialism, the Commonwealth as well. They want to keep in with spelling, even though tremendous

is going on underneath the

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: [00:52:00] recognition And if people listening disagree with this if people perhaps would not agree with your point that they've, they find a New Zealand accent no problem. argue against that argument. I can't argue against that objection because it's gradual. It's really gradual It is down to a matter of kind of have you just heard? What

context

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: How much of this are you exposed to so there is an aspect of luck in it? and I would say that basically it will build and build in a very granular kind of way until, for everybody. American or a, an American trying to Australian or a Kiwi accent

really

Aven: Hmm.

Danny Bate: And now it feels like a different accent, but it's still building soon as I've said this, happen because that's

language cannot

Aven: Yeah, yeah. It'll disprove us. Yeah,

No, absolutely. And, and I mean, like, I, I don't wanna overstate the case. Obviously. I was making a, you know, a rhetorical point. I listened quite a lot of, new Zealanders. I can generally understand New Zealand accents just fine. But [00:53:00] there was enough divergence that in certain circumstances and certain kinds of words, certain kinds of phrases, without enough context.

I struggle. And I also struggle with a Newfoundlander from time to time, you know, and that's my own country. the point being that, like, I'm not trying to say that we're all not intelligible, but yeah. we draw those lines because of sociopolitical forces and that's always true with language and dialect, of course, rather than, because there's a strict objective line of mutual intelligibility here that stops there.

I mean that we all know that. All three of us know that, our listeners know that. But I think the point about how the spelling is, is a uniter, not a divider you know, is a really important one. And I, I too, I have that argument like when Marcie, several years ago now, did a video on spelling. Mm-hmm.

You know, that was really the kind of your. Core argument there to a certain extent too mm-hmm. Is like language spelling reform sounds great until you try to think about how it would work Yeah. And immediately realize that you just have to pick a speaker to [00:54:00] privilege and the immediate drawbacks of that mm-hmm.

That are so obvious and evident. I think. I hope it all falls apart. Yeah. sure. Drop a couple of UN needed Ls and a few U'S and a couple of b's, great. But those are not the things that actually trip people up. No. it's the through thorough though of the worlds that are gonna keep, you know, people are gonna keep having to learn, non-English speakers are going to rail at until the end of time.

And I don't know how to fix that.

Danny Bate: You reform spelling and there are two possible consequences, both of which could happen at the same time. You annoy a lot of people and or you disintegrate the entire English

Aven: Yeah. So, you know, go for it.

Fun experiment to watch, but maybe not participate in Yeah.

Marcie: but you know, I, nevertheless, knowing spelling reform is, is a problematic thing at best. I still have, you know, a certain fondness for [00:55:00] some, some of those brave souls who tried to do it, tried to do it, especially orm.

I love orm. I mean, poor, or

Danny Bate: so

Marcie: as you point at, we I, I think as you pointed out in the book, we don't know for sure that he, he, he Exactly. Trying to reform it himself. Yeah. But I, you know, it's such a neat idea. It's such a neat system to read. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: Yeah. I do appreciate the caveat that we don't know that he's, intending to reform spelling and orm for context is this like a monk or an Augustinian cannon writing in Lincolnshire in England in

12th century. And

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: that he's a kind of a blip on the landscape, so we can't pinpoint to him and say, aha.

See, the reform of English spelling begins here. have to wonder if it's the opposite, that he was just experimenting out of desperation for a way to write down English that people could really read very accurately and could be spread around

Aven: also, and I think you are,

you're talking about how English has moved away from a phonemic representation the other thing that [00:56:00] we really need to think about is how Tide orality and literacy are or aren't anymore.

Right. When ORM was writing that and the way he was spelling, one of the main reasons he was doing that was because he knew the people who were gonna be using his text were going to be speaking them out loud. Always. That was the whole point, like when you were writing down whatever you were writing down up till.

I dunno, Chaucer later, unless they were just keeping accounts, they were writing for somebody to read it out loud to themselves, to others, that's what it was gonna be. So, the, closeness between the phonetic, you know, result and your writing was kind of important.

'cause in the moment you did really want to say the word the way it should be pronounced so that your audience would understand you. And yes, people still read out loud, obviously, but mostly we don't, so much of the writing we produce now is not ever really meant to be read out loud. As with so many people, I grew up reading way more words than I ever said out loud. And so I grew up with wildly inaccurate pronunciations of [00:57:00] huge numbers of words.

I knew what they meant. I knew how to use them, I knew how to conjugate them. I knew all sorts of things about them, and I could not pronounce them in a way that that was comprehensible to anyone else. And it didn't actually matter until I tried to use them that one day, and then everyone laughed at me.

You know that? Mm-hmm. That experience we all have, I think. But most of the time it did not matter that I never knew how the word was pronounced. Mm-hmm. And I think that is a situation that would be very weird to a Roman scribe or an early English scribe. The idea that you could just always be writing stuff down and never know how the words were pronounced, but still knew what they meant.

Probably didn't happen that often until a much later period in writing. I've just thought of that idea and now I'm wondering if I'm right or not. So you, you tell me whether you think that makes sense to you.

Danny Bate: I do agree and I think it is always you must not in this field, lose sight of the

different functions and different contexts of writing. When is it being used? Who is it [00:58:00] you being used by? How are they using it as well? Are they actually pronouncing these things out loud? And it's to be honest I think quite debated when silent reading as a phenomenon gets off the

it, it's probably been there from the

beginning but

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: I do agree that there are as an activity as maybe the primary purpose of a text to be read silently is a little bit more unusual and absolutely from the very beginning even further back in time than the Romans. Going back to when the

set up, this

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: is clearly optimized

and for people to

read

Aven: Yes.

Danny Bate: fluently. Like you see this, for example, in how. a of writing you

can

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: finger

up from the very

beginning So

Aven: Right.

Danny Bate: The wonderful concept of booster feedin which is booster feedin is where basically it you know the direction of text goes in one direction drop down, then goes in the other direction. And that works really well. If you are,

things with your finger and [00:59:00] sounding

the

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: a sequence.

And I just mentioned booster freedom is a term that I have learned because I've done my best to immerse myself in the study of writing. I've thrown myself into this topic with complete conviction. Still not entirely sure how to pronounce that word.

and this thing is,

Aven: I know,

Danny Bate: this is the thing.

This is the hack.

Aven: So glad you No, I'm so glad you said that because I was thinking just the same thing.

Danny Bate: But this brings us into another topic entirely entirely So I I do agree that you know to begin with there is because and spelling are to speech, they really

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: represent speech. So I think this goes as far into alphabetic history as

The Roman stage like the Roman alphabet

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: for Latin, afterwards we then do get more literacy and we do get archaic spellings.

We have the kind of, we have Rome as a center of gravity, which means that spellings are

lot more conservative especially in

Western

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: And we will get now aspects of sounds that are not represented [01:00:00] faithfully in spelling. We're going to get on multiple pronunciations. But this is the thing, it opens a door to a kind of liberation because. Every pronunciation if you read it, and it is more or less consistent with the varying competing principles of spelling, your reading and

are valid.

they're

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: for the majority of

things

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: troon and boosted work within English spelling and English

In that we have our complicated

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: position of stress, which is changeable in English. It shifts from different categories of words. It's very complicated in long words. We also have

in unres syllables

with

Aven: Mm.

Danny Bate: for example.

That creeps in and other factors now come into play. Another one is just

you

Aven: Yes.

Danny Bate: booster

freedom

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: carry on on saying that. And if you're not particularly confident and someone says it differently,

to them. This is

not just a

Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: arrogance.

could be a factor. It's also being just not[01:01:00]

If I, for

example if

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: I say this doesn't really work from accent to accents but let's say it's one of these words where, okay, so let's stick with booster feedin, and and the other person says Buson probably gonna yield 'cause I'm not massively confident.

I'm not maybe plugged in. I could be speaking to somebody who knows much more than me.

of delicate balance where

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: conversation I've

Aven: Oh, yeah.

Danny Bate: it's fine

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: don't see that

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: thing I see that as us navigating the language and also navigating the social situation, who we're talking to, how we want to come across to

how much confidence we have in our own

knowledge

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: of these factors come into play and we make a judgment and we make a pronunciation based on that. And I have a hundred percent pronounced that word differently in different conversations and interviews.

Aven: yeah.

Danny Bate: And we navigate them

every just navigate these things. Frankly if you consider what we're actually doing, language is just the basis. We are navigating [01:02:00] our social environment. We're navigating our relationship with people, how we want to come across. We put everything into how we speak and how we write.

We put our entire personalities into these completely ordinary interactions. And And it just

Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. do. So we've talked about your book and in case it hasn't been made really clear to everybody that they should be reading it. Indeed, they should be reading it.

Marcie: and it, the publication date in North America is when exactly.

Danny Bate: Oh,

Aven: Beginning of June. Yeah. Okay. But the other aspect, so we've talked about your academic background, we've talked about the book, the way we came to know who you were and, and about you is through your online sort of public linguistics, and then you've also got a podcast.

So maybe we can talk about that as the third piece of your triple threat.

Danny Bate: or the third act of the

Aven: Sure.

Marcie: So, yeah, I mean, how did you come to do this podcast? Uh, Tell us about it, first of [01:03:00] all, and, describe it a bit how did this come about?

Danny Bate: It came about because Elon Musk took over Twitter. I first really got into public linguistics. Let's First and foremost what I mean by

this is

Aven: Yes, sure.

Danny Bate: linguistics with a general audience beyond academics. So taking it away from universities and sharing it with people who, are just not within the structures of academia.

They may know about linguistics, they may know nothing. a much bigger playing field, a much bigger marketplace of people to talk to And I really got into this I felt the first little dopamine rush back in something like 2018 or 19 when I was doing my master's degree. Just had a Twitter account I I really enjoyed the fact that I could tell people about linguistics often I was wrong, and that's fine but it began small and it began on Twitter I found that this format, the microblogging format, worked really well for me. I liked the constraints a little bit [01:04:00] like a poetic template, like a sonnet, for example.

You've gotta fit your idea and all the information to a very short space of time, and it's a challenge and also a real boon to your skill as a writer. Can you explain what the thing is why somebody should care and what the main point is in a very short space of words with, severe limitations and that helps that really helps your writing style.

I think that's been very valuable for me. I really just threw myself into this format in particular, maybe sticking my head in the sand about other possibilities about podcasts and videos, all of the things that at the time were there, definitely there. I had no excuse but just didn't interest me.

I thought I could just pursue Twitter and then. Musk takes over that platform. It has and it is un undergone a renaming and I don't like to exaggerate about the changes I would just simply say that it's really changed the feel of the place the interactions that you can have there It is unrecognizable to the wild and dangerous jungle that used to be peak Twitter in which every day [01:05:00] there was a main character and your the rules of the game were you didn't want to be it you didn't want to be the main character just survive and make friends and make Like I I'm still in

really

Aven: Yep. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: contact with people, so I gained so much from that platform,

downhill and I felt very

sad

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: it became very clear to me that if I want to pursue this still. I need to branch out, I need to diversify and I'm pretty

I think

video

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: the most happening format at the moment, I think it has certain, high benchmark of quality that you would like to achieve in terms of camera quality, in terms of presenting style,

quite daunting.

I'm a big fan but it's something that it's a step that I've never been able to take or a

not been able to cross. instead there's audio and I'm very comfortable with audio 'cause you can't see me. And I set up the podcast, really inspired by all of the podcasts that I was absorbing at that time.

So it's things like the endless knots, for example. And there are many different ways to set up a podcast It [01:06:00] was always gonna be about linguistics and languages for me kind of identified quite quickly that there are two different routes that you can go down. this sort of informational podcast one of which is that you interview people, in which case the burden of knowledge is on your guest, on the presenter, not the easy route by any means. You need to get the best out of your guest whoever it is you're hosting hosting and alternatively there is the one where you, yourselves are the people producing the information, So that's your classic episodes of endless knots there's also things enthusiasm for for example, where

Lauren

Aven: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: of the interviewing people,

I am

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: of paranoid linguist that I need lot of time to put things out

comfortable with. I can spend a

day

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: one page,

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: self-producing route didn't appeal to me. I feel like it would be so much a burden on me that I would place that would be just too much, and I [01:07:00] wouldn't say anything at all at the end of the day. So I went down the interviewing route and all of that is preamble to basically saying that the podcast that I've been running for three years now is called a Language I Love is dot, dot dot. And for every episode I get a guest in to talk to me about a language that they love and also have expertise in. And I do my best to help them present all the essential information about that language while having a pleasant and accessible conversation. Done three series so far, it's still very much like a one man passion project, but I stand by it and it's one of the ways in I've tried to expand my platform a public linguist because I would like to

out of this now. And it

Aven: Mm-hmm.

yes. The diversifying is very important, But yeah, your podcast, it's really interesting. Like, I think it's a great format , it's totally fun and it means you're not gonna run out of subjects anytime soon because last I heard, there were quite a few languages in the world.

Danny Bate: Yeah. I safely say we've done 45 episodes and we haven't the surface yet.

Marcie: Yeah. If, if you were [01:08:00] to interview yourself on your podcast, what language would you pick?

Aven: Oh, well, you sort of did, didn't you?

Danny Bate: I did, actually I got a friend to sort of flip the table and, be the host for one particular episode. that was the Joy of series one 'cause I was still a PhD student and I just had a lovely group of linguistic friends that I could, twist their arm into doing an episode. and uh, the end of series one was a kind of special where. My good friend Krishnam interviewed me asked the same questions and the language I

chose

old Irish.

Now,

yeah,

Aven: mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: may be able to hear I am not I have the misfortune not to come from Ireland. I remain a huge fan of that country and the language and the history. But as I mentioned at the outset of our conversation, I wouldn't be interested in anything so relevant and modern as modern Irish. Instead, for me, it's all about old Irish. That is a language that just continues to stand head and shoulders above rivals in my affection for it. My obsession with it and what it gives me as a [01:09:00] language. it it really, it means a lot to me, uh, in terms of my, self as a linguist.

Marcie: that's one of the languages that. I could have taken as a graduate student, and I think I was maybe a little afraid of it.

Aven: So you went with easy option of Old North instead? Yes. Yeah.

Danny Bate: See this is just it. See the, the fear being afraid of it, that you mention is a totally normal thing. I should stress it's, totally normal from whatever direction you are coming from. Very often languages will appear much friendlier if you are coming from some sort of point of connection, right? So old English will appear friendly if you're and or say

German or

Aven: German Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: like that.

If you are, first language is Chinese, then old English is gonna be very difficult. So there's, you're gonna have much less to hang on to. But old Irish, no matter how you come to it, manages to be challenging for, say, speakers of modern Irish speakers of other Celtic languages and Indo Europeanist. So people who work with the whole family. And I'll, I'll briefly say why this fear is, valid because you [01:10:00] get told that old Irish is an early medieval Indo-European language. It's the earliest member of the Celtic branch for which we can give like a full profile as a language in terms of its grammar and its sounds and its word order and things like that. there we have earlier evidence for the Celtic languages, but it's much more fragmentary, like it's bits that appear in Wales and France and Switzerland and things like that. Irish, therefore is hugely important if you're going to talk about the Celtic language in its earliest stages and how it connects to the rest of Indo-European. So if you're reading an Etymological dictionary for Latin or ancient Greek, Sanskrit, old English, old Irish could well be mentioned 'cause it's representing the Celtic branch. It's standing there as saying, I'm gonna give you the old Irish word and that's gonna help you spot the connections to the rest of Celtic. And then you come to learn this language and you come to open a book, one, the alphabet. There's Latin consonants, they mean something different when they're in the middle of a word than they do at the beginning of a word, [01:11:00] right? A c is pronounced differently at the middle or the beginning.

Or you've

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: in the middle of a word is standing for some sort of labial nasal fricative type sound. You've got think, you know, delights like that. You've got all sorts of fricatives. You've You've got all sorts of palatal sounds where the sounds have the kind of input from the blade of the tongue as well. Old Irish for context, I think has something like 38 phonemes, whereas primitive Irish has about 15. So we have this incredible explosion in the history of Irish as we go from primitive, the earlier stage to old Irish to the next stage, we see a huge explosion in sounds. So that's complicated. We've got, words that are related to other words in Indo-European, but they really don't look like it because of sound changes that have gone on. got a grammar where you've got mutations. So people may be familiar with these from modern Irish and modern Welch where the beginning of the word is changing. You've got verbs that look completely different depending on [01:12:00] how many prefixed like things they have, and whether they're the absolute first thing in their sentence or not. You've got object pronouns that are literally built into a compound verb that unfixed within it in Fixx is pretty rare in general, but they're there in old Irish. You've got relative clauses. That are created by changing the verb. by mutating the first sound of its second element, or by giving it a special relative ending. So no relative pronouns, no W words or anything like that. You are changing the look of the verb in very subtle ways, which sometimes actually the orthography, the spelling of old Irish is so bad that these mutations may not be reflected.

You may not be able to read them. You've just gotta presume that they're there. All of these incredibly baffling things that are going on. And you are told that this is an Indo-European language. This is a sister of Latin and Gish and Greek and everything like this. And it is crazy. And I'll stop there and I'll let you ask [01:13:00] then the obvious question, which is why do I love it so

Aven: No, I think you've answered that actually. know a few linguists. I think you've answered it very fully as to why you love it so much,

Danny Bate: but there's a.

Aven: because it's so bat shit crazy.

Danny Bate: But, this is the thing. So let's say you have you've conquered the batshit craziness. You've made it to the top of the mountain and you've got all of these things under your belt. After this incredible linguistic climb, and you find a lovely slide waiting for you on the other side, because you need to bring in history. You need to bring in an elementary understanding of historical language change, and how a couple of changes. could produce something like old Irish from something very different that came before it, or just a couple. So something as simple like a shift to putting the stress of any word on the first syllable rather than later on, you put it on the first, instantly the endings of a word. Often the bits in Indo-European languages that have the grammatical

they might drop off. They [01:14:00] might not be

fully

Aven: Right.

Danny Bate: they might disappear otherwise. You've got things like mutations changing the beginning of the word. these come from old case endings. They actually function like case endings in that you nasal analyze the next word. you make it somehow more nasal, you make it into a mur or a Nu sound, you basically, you find that with the accusative case in old Irish grammar, and that's because basically the sound, the word that preceded, it used to end in some sort

If that sounds

Aven: Okay. Yeah.

Danny Bate: a bit complicated. I'm getting to the point. you have even the slightest awareness of the historical changes that could happen to a language and its speech. undo those changes what you find with old Irish is a very friendly Indo-European

back at you. A language that

has

Aven: Hmm.

Danny Bate: that has you know,

Aven: Right.

Danny Bate: syllables. And those syllables really do look like words that you are used to from Latin and ancient Greek. And it's this moment of epiphany, which may come early, may come later. It depends on how you go [01:15:00] about learning the language, but it is

satisfying. The scales fall from your eyes and you find that you've been looking at a proper Indo-European language all along.

And that is just a great joy and it continues to be a great kind of personal pleasure for me. I have a published paper. It was, proceedings, proceedings, uh, with a friend of mine. I co-authored a, a paper. Oh, the Krishnan, who I pressured into

doing the

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: we co-authored a paper where I basically said that these crazy, relative clauses in old Irish, basically all of them be explained with the same ingredients, the same words that you find over in India, in Sanskrit. The same ingredients, almost like perfect parallels in that you have this, then you have this, then you have this, and you have this, and you have a relative C clause. Old Irish has just taken those ancient Indo-European words and put them through a phonological blender what you're looking

at.

Aven: Hmm mm-hmm.

Right.

Danny Bate: and find something safely recognizably [01:16:00] Indo-European waiting for you on the other side for me, just the highest joy

Aven: Okay. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. No, I get that. I get that.

Oh yeah. uh, you've convinced me about why you are very interested in old Irish. Yes. Not to learn it myself, you've convinced me of its beauty.

Danny Bate: Okay, fine. I haven't converted

Aven: No, I think we're gonna have to wrap up, but I have one last question that Marcie's gonna ask you because this, this is the most important question of the entire podcast.

Marcie: Well, we know that you are something of a cat fancier, of all the languages that, that you know, that you've studied, you've encountered in your very many different linguistic travels.

What is your favorite word for cat?

Danny Bate: Brilliant. What a great question. I've been outed as a cat fanatic. It's true. I am obsessed with with the little things. And, I like this question very much. I'm gonna go predictable or a little bit let's say [01:17:00] not too far out that I'm gonna go

Italian.

Aven: Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: I love the Italian language. I love Italians in general. I remain eternally grateful to them that they actually let me try and speak Italian when I'm in Italy, unlike other European nations that will remain nameless, where they're just, nothing but the best is good enough.

That's sort of attitude. But gato I just think is a great way into this really complex word because on the one hand, as you know, Marcie you all know very well, many words for cat across the world's languages are very similar, right? and they come from a single origin, which is our bread and butter as historical linguists, and etymologists is great.

We have all these words. They mean the same thing, and they look kind of similar. They sound kind of similar as words. And yet. You poke around with cats and you get clawed, you find that this is not a straightforward family of words in very frustrating ways, because as etymologists, we need to follow sound laws.

These are laws, as, [01:18:00] as our listeners will know, not in a kind of legal sense, but sounds changing in predictable ways. And when sounds between languages that should correspond, don't, this is a problem. We often need to stipulate more things or bring in other factors and talk about borrowings or unknown intermediary languages.

And it becomes very difficult. And Kat is a classic example of this. now gato is Italian. It means cat. It looks like the word cat. And yet God. A voiced sound, a g sound like a g Captain in English is an a voiceless, aspirated sound, which that's not a thing, that's not a kind of established route or an established sound that would get us to these two

sounds

Aven: Mm-hmm.

Danny Bate: languages.

So cat as a word very quickly becomes complicated. Why does Italian have a GA an English halves, a CAK? We know that cat as a word comes from, or we could be pretty confident that, the word comes from North Africa.

And it's one of these, kind of bits of etymology that we call a van Devo [01:19:00] a wonder word, a great German, piece of terminology there. Where it seems to be that a word rather than sticking to a particular group of languages is spreading out across a geographical distance and does not care about groups of languages and language families.

It's just being enormously successful regardless of language affinity over a large area, which is just. Fascinating because the word cat is probably one of these van diverter and it's traveling along with the cats themselves Now. I love that idea because cats, I mean. They're great, but God bless 'em. They can't say the word cat.

So it seems that as cats are traveling, they're probably traveling along with humans and these humans are passing on the word to other people saying, you know, this is a cat. Look at this little guide. This is a cat. And so we've got people in ancient Italy, saying this. Kato, they're passing this on to a German, for example.

And we can basically say that, you know, once upon a time, that the word has a kind of double T it's Kato in [01:20:00] Latin. This gets passed on to a kind of pre German form of Germanic and, Kato becomes German Kaza. it still is katza today. But then we have these old features where it has, like a g it has a G sound, so connecting the German up to the Italian and then the Italian up to the North African language of origin such as Arabic or something like Arabic.

Although that's complicated because. The words in North Africa have a uvular sound slightly further back in the mouth. It's all kind of uncooperative and it's not an easy kind of ety homolog to do, and that's great. Just like, you know, the, the kind of difficult cats themselves, they can be quite uncooperative sometimes.

So too is our word for cat and I just love that. It's a great case of how etymology sometimes. Difficult. It puts us into difficult corners that are hard to get out of. It's difficult to, uh, to connect up the dots, but it becomes all the more interesting and I think all the more enjoyable

Aven: [01:21:00] Well that's perfect. So Cat fact, for the record, we also are big cat fans have won ourself and or rather she has us Yes. As is always the state of affairs and yes, very important.

if you're gonna be an online. Personality of any sort. Mm. Really. Cat fancying is like a basic prerequisite.

Danny Bate: If you can't provide anything else online for the

Aven: Yeah. It's always, it'll always do just fine. But thank you so much. It's been absolutely fascinating discussion and so much fun. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Fabulous.

Danny Bate: Thank

you so much. I've had a lovely time talking to you. I, I honestly could keep talking, but I am

Aven: Yeah.

Danny Bate: cup of tea at some point, so

Aven: so last things then. Where are you? So you've got your podcast a language I love is dot, dot. Do found all places that podcasts are found. Where are you platform wise still?

Danny Bate: So I'm sort of on YouTube. I've dare to post a couple [01:22:00] of of videos On there that don't have too much of my face. also on blue Sky, which I like very much. I'm on Instagram, which I've just got 'cause my agent told me to. And I quite like a lot, actually, quite impressed by the place. and for my writing, because I am, I just keep writing, I keep throwing articles out into the ether. You can find me on my website, danny bate.com and also on Substack as

Aven: Perfect. Great. So lots of places to go and I mean, you've been a consistently fascinating poster for years now, so I recommend you as a follow for our audience for sure.

Danny Bate: Thank

Aven: And I guess we'll see you online. So thank you again.

Danny Bate: Yeah, see you around. Thank you so much.

Aven: Bye.

Danny Bate: bye.

Aven: For more information on this podcast, check out our website, www.literative.net, where you can find links to the videos, blog posts, sources and credits, and all our contact info.

Marcie: And please check out our Patreon where you can pledge to support this show and our video project. You can go directly to the videos at [01:23:00] youtube.com/liter.

Aven: Our email is on the website, but the easiest way to get in touch with us is Twitter. I'm at Aven, er, A-V-E-N-S-A-R-A-H,

Marcie: and I'm at alliterative. To keep up with the podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcast app or to the feed on the

Aven: website. And if you've enjoyed it, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

It helps us a lot. We'll be back soon with more musings about the connections around us. Thanks for listening. Bye.

Episode 124B: Season 10 Trailer

The Endless Knot

Etymological explorations and cultural connections.