110: The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate

Introduction to Lingthusiasm

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today we're getting enthusiastic about the ancient history of languages in Europe and its neighbours. I'm here with Dr. Danny Bate, who's a public linguist, the host of the podcast

0:34A Language I Love Is, and author of Why Q Needs You. But first, a brief announcement. Our most recent bonus episode was about World Linguistics Day, which is November 26th. Coming up very soon, and other more and less obscure linguistics-related holidays, decades, anniversaries, and kinds of special days, and how those get created. You can go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm to listen to this and many other bonus episodes and help us keep the show running.

Danny Bate's Background

1:15Hello, Danny. Hi, Gretchen. Thank you for coming on, Lingthusiasm. Thank you so, so much for having me. This is surreal, safe to say. As a long-time listener to Lingthusiasm, to be on it myself is... I don't really know how I'm feeling right now, but I'll just be pinching myself while we're recording, if that's okay. Well, if you start zoning out because you think that you're supposed to just be listening and not actually participating in the conversation, I'll give you a little poke or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Thank you. Thank you. I'll be there sitting like, this guy is talking about... I know, I like these topics. I like these topics. Yeah.

Getting into Linguistics

1:51So, before we get into talking about your work and history of English and other languages, let's start with a question that we start with all of our guests. How did you get into linguistics? Right. Okay, great question. It involves a little bit of personal history. And the short answer is, I don't know. There must have been a time when I wasn't into linguistics. There must have been. I have clear memories of thinking that, you know, foreign languages are silly and what's the point of this and why do I have to go to school and other such childish impulses. But, you know, it is hard

2:25to pin down when I realised that linguistics was a thing and that it was the thing for me. Because I, you know, like so many people of my generation, it wasn't talked about at school. There wasn't a great awareness of linguistics as a subject. I'm sure that's still the case for a lot of people today, but it's improving through things like Lingthusiasm. But that wasn't there. Not to make myself sound extremely old, but it was definitely something that I came to by accident organically while searching for something to study at university that would combine my interests. I knew I liked

3:00modern languages, like French and German. I knew I liked philosophy. But it was a really a kind of haphazard chance encounter until I turned up on the first day of my undergraduate degree at the University of York in the UK. And day one, lecture one, yep, this is for me. So you took an intro linguistics class because the concept seemed like it could be kind of fascinating and you're like, this is it. This is it. Yeah. It was kind of love at first lecture.

Area of Specialization

3:28And what sort of area of linguistics did you develop specific interests in? Yes. I mean, I've always been very proud, happy to consider myself a linguistic generalist. There's really nothing within the field that doesn't interest me. I can safely say that having attended many conferences, sat through all kinds of lectures and talks. But for my own specialism, before there was linguistics for me, there was history. My parents definitely instilled in me a deep, deep love. It's affection for the past, specifically medieval history and ancient history. So that was

4:03always there. And I suppose one of the great things about the course that I took at the University of York was that it was very broad, but they did allow you quite quickly to specialise. And I realised that I liked this syntax stuff. Seemed kind of cool, kind of mathematical. I liked the way that it was really delving into stuff that as a native speaker of a language I'd never really thought about before. So that was great fun. And then the epiphany, if there ever was one, that I could then combine it with history. So all of that is to say that my specialism, which I went on to hone and refine

4:39through a master's degree and then a PhD, was historical syntax, which is the study of word order, the study of how word order changes, and especially how it works in a handful of really, really old languages. And that was how I spent four happy years doing my PhD.

Old Languages

4:56What were those really, really old languages that you looked at? So they were a group of Indo-European languages. I'm confident this is the word that has come up before, a hyphenated term. Indo-European, large family of languages. Before the modern era and the colonial period, it's already stretching from Ireland in the west to Assam in the east, a giant family of languages. And I set myself the fairly ambitious task of trying to say something about the word order of the single ancestor of this family. So we have a good idea about the sounds

5:31and the vocabulary of what we call proto-Indo-European, from which all these languages trace descent, including the language that we're speaking right now. But how did it assemble those words into sentences, essentially? What was the word order of something like Indo-European, proto-Indo-European? Indeed, is it actually possible to know? So these were the big questions. And to undertake that task, I had to study a set of languages for which we have good historical evidence. These were my darlings, seven or eight darlings, depending on how I count them, Latin, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Old English, Old Norse, Old Church Slavonic, Old Irish,

6:06and maybe Hittite, which I kind of really got into through one friend at the end. So that's it.

Oldest Indo-European Languages

6:12So these are the oldest Indo-European languages that we have written evidence for, roughly speaking? Is that true? That's fair. That's very fair to say. There's definitely caveats I would add to that. Some of these languages, for example, are not the oldest stage that we have. But what we do have that's older isn't actually very useful for doing syntactic work. The passages, the surviving texts, don't actually have much word order because they don't have many words in the first place. So to take an example, I included Ancient Greek. I really focused in on what we call Classical

6:43Greek and Homeric Greek, the language of Homer and great poems like the Iliad and the Odyssey, because we have an abundance of it. Those poems are really long. They are not the earliest stage of Greek that we have evidence for. That's called Mycenaean Greek, and the texts are limited. So that would be something like records of people having paid their taxes or something that's on an inscription of a helmet that's like, this belongs to so-and-so or somebody made me. And they're just not very long. You can't get a lot of word order out of two or three words.

7:14Exactly so. Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. They tend to be – they can be interesting. They can be a little more interesting than, say, basic bureaucracy. But it's a lot of discussion about grain. It's a lot of praising, you know, the dead people that came before you, your father saying you're somebody's somebody's father. And as a syntactician, I can look at these descriptions and go, yep, those are words. They are in order. But that's about all I can say. So you want something that's more of sort of a narrative, a connected story. Yeah, exactly so. Yeah.

7:45And so the things that I'm familiar with when it comes to Proto-Indo-European, which is sort of the level that I would say an average linguist maybe knows, but I haven't specialized particularly in the area, are, you know, we figured out a lot about the sounds because you can go between the modern-day Indo-European languages and be like, ah, well, we think this F in a word like father in English is related to a P that's in a word like pater in Latin because there's a systematic correspondence of F and P. So you can do these sound correspondences,

8:16you can do these word correspondences, oh, we think this word has this common origin, again, because of the sound correspondences. I haven't heard a lot about people trying to do

Proto-Indo-European Word Order

8:24word order as respect to Proto-Indo-European. Were you able to figure out anything? So you have just very nicely summarized chapter one of my PhD. I was very fortunate because of, you know, luck and events far beyond my control that I wasn't the first person to try and tackle this issue. I was very much following in the footsteps of a couple of linguists. My good friend, Krishnamuram Prasad at the University of Cambridge, now Oxford, and also George Walkton at the University of Constance, who just, you know, great, great people and laid groundwork that I was able

8:56to follow. This is a difficult question. And some people, great linguists, have said this is not possible. Everything that you've just outlined there, Gretchen, is valid for sounds, it's valid for words, because we have a good sense of here's a sound, here's a thing, and it's being passed down the generations, maybe with some modifications, maybe changing a bit over time, but we can kind of trace it back and say that these two words or these two sounds somehow belong to a family tree. They're kind of like sisters, and we can trace them back. We often say they have cognosy. They are cognates,

9:30basically. Cognate words, cognate sounds. And we can follow that back, back to the source. – So, can I tell you what my naive hypothesis is about Proto-Indo-European word order? – Go for it. – I will see if I'm right, or if it can be known whether I'm right. So, I think my naive hypothesis would be, we know that Proto-Indo-European was a language that had tons of endings to indicate cases, what the role of the noun was in the sentence, to indicate who the subject of the verb was, all of these kinds of things. And when you have a modern-day language like

10:01Latin or ancient Greek, you end up with quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to word order because your endings are really telling you what the role is in the sentence. And you can use word order for emphasis and things or for poetic effect, but you don't actually need the word order to do a lot of the information aspects. So, I think if I were guessing, I would say, well, maybe Proto-Indo-European also does that because we have reconstructed to have a bunch of case endings. – Yes. So, that's the conclusion of my PhD thesis. – Ah! – Well done! – Yes! Victory! – Thanks! But with much more evidence, I assume, because I'm just sort of making this up

10:35based on what… – Yeah, I mean, it was a little bit longer than our conversation so far. Yeah, I think it totaled at, you know, just shy of 100,000 words eventually. So, you've absolutely hit the nail on the head. But there were some… That's… What you've outlined there is an idea, an understanding of Proto-Indo-European syntax word order that is, you know, quite old, has a, you know, has a good pedigree to it. There were people in the 19th century who thought, come on, it must have been very flexible. The word endings are doing all the

11:05hard work. So, you know, it must have been, you know, free to mess around with these things. – Right. – And my… One of the kind of big picture points of the thesis was that even when that's true, and I do think it is true for Proto-Indo-European, the word order was very flexible. You can still have syntax. You can still have word order. It's just serving different purposes. And to the extent that we take a language like English, and I think it's fair to say for simple sentences that express facts and maybe like, you know, wishes and a handful

11:39of kind of uses that we put our sentences to, the word order of modern English is S-V-O, subject, verb, object. – Right. So, that's something like, I like pizza, which I'm sure was a topic of many Proto-Indo-European conversations. Perhaps I like cheese. I think they had cheese. – I'm pretty sure they had cheese, yeah. – They've been reconstructed to have had honey, but not bees, which I think is fascinating. With the idea that maybe they traded to get honey or something like this, we haven't found a Proto-Indo-European reconstructed word for bees. We have managed to reconstruct a word for

12:09honey. So, if you have something like, I like honey, I is the subject, like is the verbant, and honey is the object, that's English for you. – Great. And we can kind of mess around with it in English a bit. We can say things like, you know, that honey I like. But, you know, there's a sense that it's not the basic nature of English word order. And the thing is, definitely Proto-Indo-European, all the evidence allows us to say that it didn't work like that. It could mess things around. And it didn't matter so much. Let's say the role that the different parts of the sentence were playing in the overall

12:41event. So, by that I mean, like, the verb, meaning the action, what's doing the verb, what's, you know, having the verb done to it. I don't think that applies to Proto-Indo-European. But word order is definitely still there, in the sense that maybe anything that's topical, anything that's like known information between the participants of the kind of discussion out there on the steps, you know, 6,000 years ago. That's being put first, very logically. It kind of ties the new sentence to what's come before. Whereas the new information tends to come in the

13:15middle. That's something like, you know, what you want to impress on somebody tends to be the object, for example, what's kind of receiving the event, what's being affected by the kind of ongoing discourse. And then probably the verb comes last. And the object very nicely in that position probably kind of matched a kind of peak of the overall intonation of the sentence, which I find very pleasing. But that's very much speculating, because we have no sounds for this language. We don't know how it sounded like. But you can go find modern day languages that work like this, that actually do have word order, do have syntactic rules, serving these purposes of what's new

13:48information, what's old information. A language like Hungarian, for example, works pretty much like this. And that was actually one of the fun kind of micro conclusions of the overall thesis that, like, Proto-Indo-European doesn't look a lot like English. It does kind of look like Hungarian, which is, I don't know, cool. Hang on. Hungarian? I didn't think Hungarian was an Indo-European language. It is not. It is absolutely not. Ah. Yeah. Don't worry about it. Don't worry. I'm not, I'm not tricking you here or anything like that. This is not the sort of Hungarian is secretly Proto-Indo-European hypothesis.

14:20No, as cool as that is, as an idea to suggest that, it's not that. Hungarian definitely belongs to a separate language family. There's no doubt about that. That language family on a smaller scale has been called Finno-Ugrig, on a larger scale has been called Uralic. And it's just fun to speculate about some sort of connection between Uralic and Proto-Indo-European. I can't do that. It's just, it's a step too far. But I did allude to the fact that if you, you know, if you want to look at something that I think resembles really closely the word order of Proto-Indo-European,

14:55go to Russia, go to the Mari-el Republic, which is part of the Russian Federation, and you'll find Mari. And Mari syntax, it's, wow, like a striking similarity to what I was, for totally unrelated reasons, trying to propose for Proto-Indo-European. Huh. And is Mari an Indo-European language? No, still Uralic. Okay. All right. All right. But it is good to know that some extent languages do do this type of syntax because it at least sort of validates that this is a thing that languages

15:26could do. But yeah, we can't know. So, when I was in grad school, which was a while ago, I remember learning that there were sort of two competing hypotheses about where exactly these Proto-Indo-European ancestors. We know that there would have to be people who spoke this language somehow. But there were sort of two competing hypotheses about where they lived when they were doing that speaking. In the last decade or so, there seems to have been something of a resolution between those two competing hypotheses. First of all, I find

16:00it really exciting that we're still figuring stuff out about people who are literally thousands of years old and have been dead for ages. And yet, we're still able to bring new sources of evidence on to these ancient peoples. Can you talk to us a little bit about what those

Competing Hypotheses

16:16two hypotheses are and how we did some of that figuring out? Yeah. I know this wasn't really your area of research, but it's all related. While it may not be my specialism, I've done my best to keep track of these developments developments because they are so cool. They are just so cool. I'm sorry, exactly what you say there. I cannot believe that this field, which is dealing with such old subject matter and is itself quite an old field. I mean, the idea of Indo-European, we're talking 19th century, definitely. We've got the first few people in the, well, actually in the 17th

16:53century, we've got people kind of drawing connections between languages, picks up speed at the end of the 1700s and then kind of blossoms from there. And this is the sort of like old school, like philology field. The philologists were doing some of this comparative work before like the term linguistics was even coined. Exactly so. They really would not have recognised the term linguistics. They would have recognised the term philology, which tended to be quite old, had a kind of Greek pedigree to it. But I would also say that these people kind of were and kind of weren't linguists in our modern sense. I think it's

17:23just the idea of the development of a field is a separate topic, which I'm also very interested in. And I think they had different priorities. I think their priorities were they had all these old texts. They love texts. They love all the Latin scholars. They love Julius Caesar and Cicero and Homer and all that good stuff. And they were just noticing these similarities. And from that, from that kind of feeling of how is Homer here and, I don't know, Plautus, a Roman writer, kind of using the same words. What's going on here? So different motivations as a field. So that's philology.

17:53And it's been around for a long time. And we are still making contributions to the foundations that they lay down. And I just think that's so cool. Yeah. So to answer your question, Gretchen. So where did we think that the Proto-Indo-European people initially came from? There were sort of two competing hypotheses. Well, the short answer is that for a long time, we thought that they came from basically everywhere. Like, I can find you. Okay, well, there were many competing hypotheses. There have been some. And of course, you know, all sorts of theories have been proposed. It was very fashionable to say that they came from Europe for a long time. We're talking like Central Europe

18:29for reasons that get into very unsavory areas, you know, quite offensive areas, I find. But we've moved away from those ideas. And gradually, as more work was done, more people joined the field. A couple of ideas definitely rose to the fore. These are, I'll use the kind of short terms, the Anatolian hypothesis and the Steppe hypothesis. So for geography nerds out there, Anatolia is that kind of large chunk of land that is now today Turkey, just, you know, surrounded by the Black

19:00Sea on one side, Mediterranean on the other side. And the idea there is that the Proto-Indo-European originated from that point and spread out from there in all directions. Geographically, it makes sense. Bunch of evidence from the languages that makes sense. So it's good. That's kind of emerging. It's Colin Renfrew, Lord Colin Renfrew, he is now. See, linguistics gets you places. He proposed that, and I want to say something like the end of the 70s. So, and that really, really caught on because he was able to connect it to things like farming,

19:32the progression of farming as a new way of life. So it had substance. The second way, the Steppe hypothesis, also called the Kurgan hypothesis, which was again, that's sort of like 1950s, 1960s, that that's emerging. Lots of people proposed it, but there's one or two people in particular who drove this idea forward that it comes from the Steppe. So that's not Steppe as in what you have steps up to your, you know, upstairs. That's Steppe as in double P-E at the end. And this is this huge swathe of grassland that roams from Europe through Eurasia, basically kind of connects

20:07Eurasia as a thing, all the way into Central Asia. And it's a ginormous stretch. And what countries are there in the modern sense? I mean, so the Steppe is huge, but the homeland of the language, at least, of Proto-Indo-European is placed in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia. Okay. So relatively close to Turkey, not that far from each other, which is maybe one of the things that makes it hard to distinguish between these two hypotheses. It's not like one hypothesis saying, ah, they come from Ireland. The other hypothesis is like, no, they come from Sicily. And like, those are quite far from each other. So they should leave very

20:39distinct evidence. But the Steppe and Turkey are both in that sort of middle point between the Euro side and the Indian side of the Indo-European group. Exactly. Yeah. But in different spots in that point. They're two sides of the Black Sea. Yeah. Which means that they have their strengths, which means that they have a lot in common and they were successful as hypotheses for a region. Then I would say really from the 2000s, 2010s

21:09onwards, it felt kind of settled as a debate. I think even Colin Renfrew from the Anatolian hypothesis, I heard that even he was kind of convinced in his later years of actually the Steppe hypothesis being more or less right. And certainly when I was first getting into Indo-European as a field, it felt like a done deal. Like one hypothesis has one over the other. And then, of course, in this glorious vault face of science, roughly, I was actually trying

21:40to Google this to kind of identify the smoking gun where this change comes from. The earliest I could find really was kind of 2018. Couldn't go much further back than that. New evidence, a new source of evidence comes to light that really upends the picture. And that source of evidence is genetics.

Genetic Evidence

21:59So, we've done a lot of this linguistic history because we sort of have access to languages that sort of are as old as we've found. There's also been a lot of archaeological evidence saying, okay, here's where people were buried, how they were doing grave structures, which is where we have a lot of evidence for, okay, these people are culturally similar because they have similar burial practices. So, the archaeological evidence has been around for a long time. But modern-day human genome sequencing is relatively new. What does the genetic evidence tell us? It tells us incredible things, long and short of it. So, you're absolutely right. And we should

22:31mention there's kind of the third member of this party, which is archaeology. And I think it's fair to say that archaeology really tipped the scales in favour of the step hypothesis. When people like David Antony are saying, look, we have burial mounds, we have a people who left their mark on the landscape. That really helped the idea that the step is where it all comes from. Then the genetics enters the scene. And looking at the early papers, they're not too focused on Indo-European and people who use these languages. They're just looking at the dispersal of big groups of people across Eurasia

23:06and the Middle East. And they start to just show that these groups of people that they're testing, so they're testing modern-day people. They're testing skeletons, like the DNA that we have preserved in skeletons. They're showing different amounts from different sources. Basically, they're showing the movement of people. And that is only partly supporting the step hypothesis. It's definitely lending some weight. So, definitely the idea of these step people, known as the Yamnaya culture,

23:36they're definitely moving further north. They're integrating with another culture, probably spreading the language that way, spreading their genes as well, which we can still see. But there's just this heavy proportion of DNA, which seems to come from the south, from south of the Caucasus Mountains. And that's Anatolia. That's modern-day Turkey. Right. It's not... I don't think it's where, in the kind of original formulation of the Anatolian hypothesis, it's where they placed it. I think it's much further to the east of Anatolia, but it's still

24:06kind of Anatolia. It's still, you know, the borders of, what is today, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, countries which we kind of call, you know, the Caucasus region, basically. Right. And it's showing a significant percentage of DNA that's coming from that region based on matches from people from the Middle East, people from those countries today. And this is like a stick of dynamite. Like, it's throwing a grenade into the field. And not in a bad way, because now people's minds,

24:37scholars' minds, are just racing as things which they kind of had to dismiss to get on board the step train as it was accelerating. Now these things can now come back. And people are talking about how, well, firstly, of course, they're re-evaluating the Anatolia hypothesis. They're saying, look, you know, somebody at least among these speakers are south of the Caucasus mountains. But also, like, for a long time, people have speculated between speakers of Proto-Indo-European and speakers of really old

25:08other Proto-languages from that area, like Proto-Semitic and Proto-Kartvalian. And now, those ideas don't seem too far-fetched. Ah. So this idea that one of the factors in the development of Proto-European and the split of Proto-Indo-European into so many different languages that became, you know, both ancient languages and modern languages also happened because of this contact between other groups of people who were already speaking their languages. Sure. There you go. It opens up a much wider world of people, you know, with whom the language was in

25:41contact. Exactly. So it's really broadening the horizons, literally, I suppose, of the idea of Indo-European. That's not to say, I really want to state this emphatically, that's not to say that the step hypothesis is out the window. I think, actually, to summarize the situation, the evidence from genetics allows us to say that they're both right, basically. I've seen a couple of names for this. I've seen people call it the Armenian hypothesis, not saying that Armenian is Proto-Indo-European. It is actually a daughter of it, but that has its own story. What they mean is, like, it's coming from

26:16what is Armenia. I've also seen Trans-Caucasus as a new sense, that basically it's a language that crosses the Caucasus mountains and becomes something slightly different. So what it is in the steppe region, to the north of the Black Sea, is what you could call, like, core Indo-European, like the core languages that have the closest similarities to each other. Okay. And then what is it in the other region? In the other region, then, it's evolving into things like Anatolian. So that language family involves things like Hittite, sadly, no longer with us, RIP. But it's a great language family

26:51that we've got a bunch of evidence for, and possibly some other kind of early splitters from the family tree. But I think the main one is that this allows us to say Anatolian split off early. It didn't make the transition to the north of the Caucasus. And hence, we get a lovely explanation for why languages like Hittite are so different to the rest of Indo-European. So you have sort of proto-Indo-European as this common language, and then to most of the group, and then you have sort of proto-proto-Indo-European, which also includes Hittite or

27:23something, if you want to call it that. Great. Exactly. I've seen proto-proto-Indo-European. I've seen pre-proto-Indo-European. It's all getting a bit silly. I'd have to look at that 2023 paper that really kind of really was the big explosion to see what the authors of that paper suggest. But yeah, we're talking about, let's just say, two stages, with two names to go with those two stages. Right. And traditionally, we've just been referring to them all as proto-Indo-European, because we're like, well, they must be related, and they're all old. I would say that's been the consensus. There are alternatives. Some people have talked about

27:55proto-Indo-Hittite to indicate the earliest stage that we know about, proto-Indo-Anatolian. And there's all sorts of possible cases, but there's just something about PIE. It's caught on, and it works. And when people use it, they search for alternatives to describe the subsequent stages. Right. Yeah, it sort of captures the imagination. I've been reading a recent book called Proto by Laura Spinney, which talks about this history and lays out the linguistic story, the genetic story, the archaeological story. And I think it's really a great book for history buffs.

28:29It's got so many maps in it of all of the different historic spaces in there. The author is not a linguist. She's a journalist. I'm interested in what's your opinion of the linguistics in this book. Like, is this a book that you would recommend to people? Yes. That's the short answer. Yes, I would. I can safely recommend it, definitely. So as you say, Laura Spinney is a journalist by trade, first and foremost. And this book, it does reflect that. It does reflect that in many different ways, that she has come to the field afresh. And she's used

29:03her journalistic skills to identify really the best people to talk to about some of these subjects. You know, from my position within the field, if you were to say, oh, Danny, who would you talk to about, I'd say, Old Irish? I'd have a name. I read the book, there he is, quoted in this book. So even though she has come to this topic fairly recently, she does not deny this herself, because I've interviewed her myself, and we've spoken a great deal about the journey to writing Proto, she quickly got the bug and then used her sense of, you know, who's good? Who can

29:39summarize this for me to get great information out of experts and then package that in a very accessible way? That's fantastic. So we'll link to that book as well, if people are looking for a, you know, a book to read yourself or get as a gift for someone who's interested in historical things. Exactly. I will just say, I will add one thing as well. And again, Laura herself totally does not deny this. This is not a classic introduction to the idea of Indo-European. I just want to say that. Like it's, if you were looking for that, the book would, you know, it would surprise you. I don't

30:11want to say disappoint you, but it would be something other. And I can definitely recommend books like that. But Proto is just done in a different way, in a way that is refreshing, therefore, because it's gone about this whole subject in a totally, you know, totally different order. And also, of course, it doesn't claim to just talk about language. It's very much being a meeting point between three conversations. So that's linguistics, archaeology, and genetics, which more or less, they're not talking to each other, these fields. So that's what Laura's tried

30:42to do, to bring them together. Yeah, I thought it was really neat because I know the sort of traditional linguistic story, but I don't know the genetic stories and the archaeological stories. So for me, it was really fascinating to get to draw on those strands as well. One of the things that I thought was particularly neat is I've often read histories of Proto-Indo-European that are sort of coming at it from the – and then we got English perspective, which obviously has a certain level of appeal to me as an English speaker who is quite fond of English. But also, sometimes it feels like this leaves some of the other languages on the Proto-Indo-European family tree with a bit of

31:15short shrift because you get this sort of, okay, you know, and then we have, you know, Proto-European and there's Sanskrit, and then we have Latin and Greek, and then we have English and the Norman conquest, and here we are. But there's all these sort of other languages on the Proto-Indo-European family tree, like Hittite, like Chakarian, which I knew very little about, that I've seen the names of and been like, oh, I wish I at some point had the version that gives me this sort of broader thing without only focusing on the English aspects of the story. So, one of the things I liked about the Proto-book is there's a whole chapter on Chakarian. I didn't know anything about Chakarian

31:47before, and now I know a few things. So, that aspect of things where it was trying to give the whole story of this language and this language family, not just the story that ends with English and sort of stops there was something that really appealed to me about it. But if people are looking for a more traditional introduction to Proto-Indo-European, do you have any thoughts on where they might want to go for that? Yeah, so there's a variety of books out there, and all Indo-Europeanists have their favourite one, usually for kind of sentimental reasons. It tends to be the book that opened their eyes to the world

32:20of Indo-European. The one that did that for me, and that I've really relied on because it's very much not a passive book, it kind of asks you to engage and to think about things and also kind of sets you little puzzles at the end of each chapter, would be Indo-European linguistics, an introduction by James Claxon, who's at Cambridge, and as a book it very successfully does what it says on the tin. But, before you go buying any books, not that I don't recommend buying books because books are great, I would recommend YouTube. Frankly, I would really, really recommend YouTube, and I believe that over the past decade, YouTube linguistics has really experienced a kind of golden age,

32:57like a really flowering of so many accounts. And for a friendly, you know, not too overlong introduction to something like Indo-European, I would recommend accounts like Simon Roper, looks a lot at the history of English specifically, brings English to life in fun ways, but does talk about older languages, proto-languages too. And also Jackson Crawford, who's been doing great stuff, again, starting from his Norse perspective, that's kind of his starting point for his videos, but there's lots of Indo-European stuff there too. Frankly, just searching Indo-European into

33:31YouTube will bring up good stuff. And it's just, it's being done in a way that makes my Indo-Europeanist heart very happy, in that it's not overwhelming the listener, and it's just taking them by the hand and saying, you know, this subject is there, it's really cool, and here's a few things that you need to know to get you started. One of the things I particularly like that is available on YouTube, and I think possibly places like SoundCloud and stuff like audio, is audio recordings of this fable that's been created that we think uses words that the proto-Indo-Europeans would have known. And I'm avoiding

34:08saying the name because now I'm second-guessing how to pronounce it. Is it Schlechter's fable? Schleicher. Schleicher. So it's a sort of fun little fable, and you can hear different people's theories of proto-Indo-European in terms of their different renditions of what this fable could have sounded like. Absolutely, yes. And people have done that online. There are other kind of really fun recreations. There's one that I actually included in the interview with Laura Spinney, which we can include a link to because it's really good. They actually got actors to come in. There's a little bit of kind of crackling fire sounds in the back, mosquitoes. You know, close your eyes and you're

34:43on the step 6,000 years ago. Yeah, amazing. So it's great. Schleicher's fable is also a great starting point. I would only say that it's an old idea. It's been around a while. If we were to recreate it, we'd probably do, I don't want to say a better job, but maybe a bigger job. Like, we'd include more words. We'd be a bit more diverse with our storytelling. There wouldn't be so much talk of sheep, I think, compared with the original. There's a lot of sheep in it. There's a lot of sheep, which may not grab the kind of future Indo-Europeanist immediately.

35:13It's a lot of sheep, a lot about hills and that sort of thing, but it is good. And I like what you do say there, that there had been different renditions. There's been different attempts to actually pronounce this fable. There's been different attempts to actually, as well, to reconstruct it, to say what sounds it would have had. And to the extent that the original formulation of Schleicher's fable by, you know, the original author would almost, he wouldn't really recognize a modern day version of this because the field has progressed. And we have all these things, if you've seen any kind of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, we have

35:46all these H's followed by H1, H2, H3. They're called laryngeals. The H1, H2, H3 really gets me. No, no, no, they're awesome. I will stand by them. They are awesome, but I get that they are a little bit off-putting when you first come to the language. They look really cool, but I don't know how to pronounce them. Well, there's a reason for that. Does anybody? That's the point. We have a great idea, and these are kind of hotly contested things. And I mentioned them, these three H's known as the laryngeals. I mentioned them because in the original formulation, people at the time wouldn't have known about them, which is nice. I just think it shows the field has

36:19progressed. So this is a set of sounds that we think were all produced with the larynx or sort of like far down in the throat. Ish. Ish. Sort of where H is. And they would have been different, and you can tell they're different because of the effects on the surrounding vowels and things. But we don't actually know which one was which or how they produced in a modern sense because we don't have enough evidence. There's no multi-thousand-year-old gramophones that tell us how things were pronounced. Exactly so. That is an intro to laryngeals in a nutshell. Nicely done. So yeah, this is the

36:50thing. We have these sounds that must have existed, but they left so few traces behind and enough traces to then make it into the written record. And there is a great parallel to this. If this idea sounds strange, like how do you have evidence for a sound that you don't have evidence for? Very reasonable objection. I would say that there is a great parallel in modern day English, which is a parallel that I've totally pinched from a really good YouTube account, which kind of I loved, is that say, you know, the unthinkable happens and all written

37:23English is lost and people are studying English with some sort of cataclysm that wipes out all our records from a certain point in time. People would piece together certain sounds of English that might not then be written down. They must have said that like an English speaker from the UK in the year 2025, he can't have pronounced, like there must have been a sound like r in some older stage of his language, which has then left lots of effects behind. Let's say that, God forbid, you only

37:54have my English left in a thousand years' time. Then you're like, well, there must have been some sort of R-like sound in words like car, but he's not actually saying the R. Exactly. He's saying car, but he's saying hand. So that he clearly has an A sound and an R sound. And the R is long. And we have, let's say we have recordings from this strange land of Montreal, where Gretchen McCulloch is speaking. And she has some sort of, she's doing something with her sounds as well in saying car

38:25and farm, if indeed you do. You do, don't you? You're rotic. I do, I do have, I'm rotic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Canadians are rotic. Canadians are rotic. Okay, great. But like something's going on, they're comparing the two and saying, well, what could be the common denominator of these two parallel effects in the same words? Maybe there was a sound there once upon a time. And indeed, we today have the written record of English, and we know that there was. And it was like a R sound originally, and it's since changed. And my English is doing its best to absolutely get rid of it once

38:56and for all, but it's leaving effects behind. Well, except between two vowels, then you have to stick it back. Oh, yes, true. That's true. Yes. Drawing, soaring, well, like it's getting its revenge. Yeah. Speaking of letters, you've recently written a book about the history of the English alphabet. And you sort of, I thought, very cunningly take the individual letters as entry points to try to tell this broader story of the history of how things got written down and how that writing system changed. So we don't have a ton of time to go through every single letter. That would be a whole

39:28audiobook, which perhaps you're recording. I have. Yes, I have. Yes, my voice is still recovering. When I recorded the audiobook of Because Internet, they told me to eat marshmallows to keep my voice up. Marshmallows and green apples. Okay, where was this advice when I was doing it? Brilliant. The marshmallows are to soothe your throat, apparently, and the green apple are to make you less clicky. I don't know if either of them work, but I found that bubbly water really helps sort of, you know, be a little spa for my muscles. I like that. Yeah. I mean, all I did was just have

40:01plenty of fluids. And I can safely say in my entire life, I have never been so hydrated.

40:10So you have this book about the history of the alphabet. Perhaps we can highlight a few

History of the Alphabet

40:14individual things about particular letters, just to give people a bit of a taste. Of course. So one of the stories that I was looking for, and I liked that it was in there because it's one of my favourites, is the very short version of our alphabet. We got it from the Romans, who got it from the Greeks, who got it from the Phoenicians, who sort of adapted it from the Egyptians, but also changed it a lot. One of the things that's always confused me is, even if you just compare our alphabet with the Greek alphabet, is the Greek alphabet goes alpha, beta, gamma, dot, dot, kappa, and very

40:48clearly has a gamma and a kappa for the g and the k sound. Okay, we're doing so good. English and Latin before it has C. Why do we have C and also K? Yeah, this is just it. And also G. We could have just borrowed very straightforwardly two different letters, two different sounds. What happened? Can you tell us about this story? Yeah, I mean, gladly. Gladly. And before I do, I devoted a whole chapter basically to this exact issue, this disagreement between us and the Greeks. And for context, the book is

41:22YQ Needs You, a title which I'm still quite proud of, to be honest. And every letter gets its own chapter. So it goes all the way from chapter A to chapter Z. And really by accident, it was just this incredible coincidence. The first five letters, A, B, C, D, E, allowed me to tell a kind of bare-bones story. Let's see how well I did at that. But to tell the nuts and bolts of the alphabet from its very mysterious kind of murky origins all the way up to the present day with English.

41:56And I tackled this exact issue very neatly in chapter C, the third chapter. Yes. And so we need to explain what is going on with the letter C. It does come from Greek gamma, which in ancient Greek and in modern Greek stands for, usually, the sound G. It's a hard G, as in words like get and girl and go-go, stuff like that. That is not a million miles away from some of the sounds of our letter C. But, you know, S, G, what's going on? This is very strange.

42:33The thing that I would really emphasize first and foremost is that the Romans were really kind of ruthlessly efficient with their alphabet. Letters generally didn't stand for more than two sounds. Two was kind of maximum. One was ideal for them. Because they could. Like, you know, they had a free hand, literally, to redesign things. And with that in mind, the sound of the letter C was not S. It was K. It was a hard K. We've got a whole bunch of evidence for this that I don't need to go into. In the absence of, you know, recordings of ancient Romans, it's a fairly safe thing to say

43:08that it's a K. And the S pronunciation comes later. That's a post-Roman development. So our modern-day pronunciation of Caesar is originally Kaiser. It's Kaiser, basically. And the name for emperor in German is Kaiser, right? It's where it comes from. German preserves it. English does not. I mentioned that not just because I like the Romans, but also because K and G are not a million miles away from each other. They're closer. They're actually produced with the same parts of the mouth, the velum, so the kind of the soft palate and the back

43:42of your tongue. So that's nice. We've kind of brought those much closer to the Greek original. But the difference is they don't have voicing. It's the K. Your vocal folds, your larynx in your throat. You can touch it yourself and say something like K, K, K, K, K, K, K. It's not voicing when you say the K sound. It is voiced when you say G. Everything's involved when you say G, including your voice box. And this difference, that kind of switching off of the voicing that gets us from Gamma to C is not a natural sound change. That is because the alphabet is transmitted

44:18to us via another member of this great story. You didn't mention them there. Aha! I deliberately left them out for you. Yes. Because I suppose you allowed me to have the great reveal. These are the Etruscans. The mysterious Etruscans. These are the Etruscans. The Etruscans are this incredible... They're incredible. They're just an incredible people that rise up in this brilliant flash of culture, of art, of religion and language and then just get kind of flooded by Rome, basically. Rome, which they helped to foster

44:49as a state, then drowns them, basically. But they left their mark. I mean, it's still there in Tuscany, for example, from Etruscan. So they're still kind of around. And I love the Etruscans. The most important thing to mention here is that the Etruscans were speaking a very, very different language. It was not an Indo-European language, and it could and did have very different sounds. Languages are, you know, there's no essential inventory of sounds that spoken languages need to have. And they did not have the sounds b, d, and g, as in, I don't know,

45:25bet, det, and get. They didn't have these sounds. That's what the evidence allows us to say. So, they take a letter like gamma, used for a voiced g sound, and they think, well, we like this letter. It's very nicely shaped. It's very simple to draw. It's at the start of our alphabet. It kind of belongs there. But we don't have the sound g for which it currently stands. I know. We'll repurpose it. It'll be k instead. They kind of switched off the voicing and sent the letter down a completely different set of tracks. And it's in the throats of the Etruscans that we have our letter C, basically,

46:00this big divergence. And so, then when the Romans borrowed the, you know, subsequent Etruscan gamma, which I feel like I want to call gamma right now, just to – that's not what anybody called it, I don't think. But then they're like, but hang on, we do have a distinction between the sound and the sound. What are we supposed to do? Well, they could have gone back to Greek and borrowed kappa again or reborrowed gamma, but instead they added this little stroke to the C

46:30to make what looks like our modern G, which I have particular fondness for as someone with a G at the beginning of my name. But yeah, like I just – that always solved a little puzzle for me because I was like, why do we have this and the Greeks don't? And then there's subsequent levels of sound change that lead to both C and G having multiple pronunciations in English and French and other Romance languages. And a lot of languages pronounce C in a whole lot of very different ways. Exactly. Okay. One of the other things I enjoyed about why Q needs you, in this case from chapter N,

Doubled Letters in English

47:04was you use this as an excuse to talk about doubled letters in English, which I thought was very linguist of you, to be like, ah, yes, doubled letters, that needs to be part of this alphabet story. Do you want to tell us a bit about doubled letters? With pleasure, because I rely on them for my own name. I'm Danny. Yeah. And even though the second N doesn't, you know, contribute to the nasalness of my name, it still deserves to be there. If you take it away, I become Danny. So, you know, what's going on? And so definitely my own name I took as a source of immediate inspiration, coupled with the fact,

47:37you know, I've spent a lot of time with these letters, and I'm hesitant to say that I find some more interesting than others. And N is, it's just a fairly well-behaved letter. I fully admit this in the introduction to the chapter, because I really did want to write the book in a kind of light way, put a bit of my own perspective on these things and say, you know, N, it's great. It's a pretty kind of dependable letter. It's doing its job. It hasn't undergone all of these sound changes like C and G and... No, it's very kind of... N is there. N is there for us as a letter. And that's very nice.

48:09Well done, N. It's very dependable. Okay. Okay. Okay. Oh, dad jokes, is it? Okay. Okay. All right. Go on. That's the level. I love that opportunity to talk about the double letters, because it is just this incredible example of something that we take for granted, something that we don't think about, and yet also something that we can work with, kind of compute. When I say doubling letters, I'm specifically talking about doubling consonant letters. So, hence the two M's in Danny, both of

48:43which, you know, represent the single N sound. It's there in words like better that has two T's, both of which are representing T. Like with all sorts of words, our spelling is totally littered with double letters. Littered. Letters. It's there. So, what are they doing? But we don't pronounce a word like Danny as Danny or letter, which you would in, for example, Italian or in the many languages where you do have a doubled consonant where the consonant is produced twice or produced longer. That's not what we're doing with them in English.

49:16No, exactly. English has developed this amazing system. I really think it is amazing because it's very old and because we managed to compute it today without any problems. Totally, you know, it comes very naturally to us where basically we double the consonant letter to indicate to the reader that the vowel, the sound, the vowel sound before it is a short one. So, Danny, the A is one of the short vowels of English. Take it away, we get Danny, which is not a long vowel. It's a diphthong,

49:49but, you know, it's a kind of, it's a bigger vowel. But historically speaking, it was a long vowel. Exactly. Yeah. So, take a word like letter, a word I've had to write a lot for this book. Take the T away. And the E, the first E change is liter. And we get liter. So, we naturally change that. Right. Or something like bitter versus biter. Bitter versus biter. You remove that T and suddenly the vowel quality completely changes. That's an even better example because those are two actual words in English. It's the curse of linguists. We can never think of examples off the top of our heads.

50:21But one of the things I think is interesting is that it doesn't just work for actual words like bitter versus biter. It also works for something like letter versus liter, where that's not a word and yet we do have this intuition about how to pronounce it because it's so systematic in English to use this double letter to shorten the vowel. Exactly. I give the example in the book of the website Instagram ends in a single M when it's just the bare word Instagram, the name of the website. And yet, if you want to derive new words, somebody who uses Instagram, somebody who appears on Instagram, so that's an Instagrammer and being

50:57Instagrammed, the M gets doubled. We know that we need to double it in a very organic way. Otherwise, it would be Instagrammer, which the vowel changes, basically. And I would put money on the fact that nobody has decreed this to be the case. Instagram headquarters or meta headquarters hasn't said, all of you, you need to double the M when you're using derived words. And I just think this is absolutely incredible. It works. It's efficient. We learn it, I think, very early on.

51:30And additionally, it's really old. We have evidence for this system going back really to the 12th century, the 1100s, where writers at the time who have lived through the Norman conquest, lived through the kind of disintegration of the old way of being English, writing down the English language or old English as it is at the time, have a free hand to use letters differently. And quite quickly, we see people using this system to spell words that never had double letters before.

52:06It's very clever. I had one last letter that I wanted to mention from the 26 chapters. And this was the final one, letter Z, which partly I just wanted to give a plug for resolving the should we call it Z, should we call it Z situation by referring to it as Izzard, which I think would be an excellently diabolical proposal. But also, I wanted to add a story for you, which is so that you can have regrets about not being able to get everything in even before the book is barely out. Mm-hmm. I already have a few, but go on.

52:40Sorry. And this is a story about why, even though the Oxford English Dictionary recommends the spellings in I-Z-E in words like analyze or realize, things like that, why current British usage – or the uses that we currently consider British – is to use the S for those words. And this comes from the history of language settings in spellcheck in Microsoft Word. Because the classic advice is use S, use Z, it doesn't matter, just be consistent within a document. Spellchecks can't handle this,

53:14they're too dumb. So they can only handle, I will recommend only this one or only that one. And so because the American usage was so strongly in favour of Z, and the British usage had always allowed both. When the British spellcheck was invented, it only recommended the S because they wanted people to be consistent within a document. And this led to a tremendous uptick in terms of I-Z-E use, as if it was this British thing, which it's only been for about 20 years.

53:46I love that. I love that. I just – it's – and people sort of don't question the spellcheck. A spellcheck tells me this must be the British way to do it. Okay, I guess I better do it. This is a great story. This is why you wrote Because Internet and I didn't, basically. I made my peace with that. I could not write that incredible book. But no, I do nod to spellcheckers a couple of times, only in passing, because that is a very fair point. We think that spellcheckers

54:18kind of work for our language, that they're shaped by a language, by our language. It's kind of the other way around. Spellcheckers enforce language. They direct us. I'm always fighting with spellcheck to be like what I think Canadian English should be spelled like, which involves doing things like O-U-R and R-E spellings on words like colour and centre, but then also using I-Z-E in words like realise. Because to me, this merger – and

54:48there's never been a spellcheck system still, in 2025, that actually does the level of hybridity that I want from a Canadian spellcheck system. Even when I set it to Canadian English, it doesn't do that. Yeah, fair enough. And then people in my homeland, in the UK, might be thinking, oh, yes, you know, I-S-E, proudly British, you know, woo. And it's not that old. And the Oxford English dictionary tells that you shouldn't do it. It's only been since like 1999.

55:19Yes, it's as old as Microsoft.

55:23But people have such strong opinions about it that we made t-shirts and other merch that say, not judging your grammar, just analysing it. And the original version that we had, had an S in analysing, because Lauren made the document first, and I don't care about changing anybody's spelling. And she's very firmly on the S in Australia, and I'm much more hybrid. And then so many people said, oh, well, I would buy this, but it doesn't have a Z in it, and I require a Z. But now we have both versions. Okay. Yeah, I just think that's being good linguists, I think.

55:56So you can get a little bit of linguistic data from which one someone picks. Love it. I love it. Yes, yes. Monitor your sales. See how it's going. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Danny, thanks so much for coming on Lingthusiasm. If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would that be?

56:16It's very tempting, at this point, to give a attempt some big, lovely, general statement about languages and linguistics. So that's exactly what I'm going to do. Go for it. I love this field, and I've done my best through podcasts, tweets, now a book, to share that love with people. And I do believe, knowing myself, that at the heart of it is a real, a genuine desire for people to know how brilliant they are.

56:49I am not looking to impress on them how much I know, how much they ought to know, nothing of the sort, but how naturally brilliant we humans are, and how interesting we've made the world through language. That is a guiding, driving principle behind everything that I do. It's definitely there in the book, even though I am British, I try not to be too emotional about these things. It doesn't come naturally. But I want to take the reader by the hand in this book

57:23and say, we've been doing this incredible thing so naturally for so long. And then in the history of writing, so bringing it back to the book, we then do it again. We're already speaking, we're already signing, we're doing all of these things that tend to come very early on in infancy, and then we invent this separate system with its own principles and logic and incredible potential for bringing people

57:55together and making cooperation possible, i.e. writing. We do it all over again. So that's what I impress upon people. When you study linguistics, humanity just starts to look great. For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or at lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com slash transcripts, and you can

58:28follow at Lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including the international phonetic alphabet, branching tree diagrams, boobin, kiki, our favourite esoteric unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch like not judging your grammar, just analysing it, spelled either way you'd like it, shirts, and aesthetic IPA posters at lingthusiasm.com slash merch. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is allthingslinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren's social media and blog is superlinguo. You can follow our guest

58:59Danny Bate on bluesky at dannybate.bsky.social. His podcast is A Language I Love Is, which both Lauren and I have been on, and his book is called Why Q Needs You. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chat room to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include an interview with the Spanish translator of Because Internet about what the

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