Dr Danny Bate

a woman is wearing a headset while sitting at a desk . ALT: a woman is wearing a headset while sitting at a desk .

Shittification and shareholder return

A rehash of an old thread

Why is everything crap. Well, here we learn why Adam Smith was an early Marxist, in that though he had great faith in markets

He had zero faith in merchants

And the reason why, is why no one answers your helpline

1/n

Happy birthday, Alex!

YouTube video by NativLang Why French sounds so unlike other Romance languages

Arguably, they spoke it so well and often that they gave it the full means and motive to become another language...

... but a serious answer would be recommending this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2TW...

Good, I can write a sequel!

Pronunciation Studio on Instagram: "A lot of people have been asking about this modern vowel shift in British (Southern) English. I think the best way to understand it is to compare 3 accents: RP - R... 6,322 likes, 143 comments - pronunciation.studio on November 18, 2025: "A lot of people have been asking about this modern vowel shift in British (Southern) English. I think the best way to understand...

@dannybate.bsky.social Is another great vowel shift underway? www.instagram.com/reel/DRMpbH3...

The (Old) Czech form samet was most probably the source of Yiddish samet סאַמעט, because with its initial s- (and not z-) the word cannot come from Early New High G Sammet (< MHG samît, samât etc), and definitely not from ModG Samt.

That Latin word consobrīnus there (perhaps literally 'with-sister's-son' or 'with-mother's-sister's-son') is the ancestor of English's word 'cousin', only put through the linguistic meat grinder of early medieval France.

Ah, that's good to know, thanks!

Kindle has endnotes, not footnotes? 😮 I'm rather down about this, I think many of my 'jokes' depend on immediacy. Can you at least click on their number to be taken straight to them?

You make a good point! I suppose we can judge it against the classical language of earlier centuries, because that language was still around – people always preserved and tried to emulate it (and still do), but the Latin of these stones suggests its author didn't have access to it

Trilingual heresy - Wikipedia

Danny deliciously writes about the linguistic aftermath of the Gregorian reform and some unexpected developments in Slavic-speaking area.
The icing on the cake for me is the Trilingual Heresy, one I had never heard of.
Thank so much Danny !

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triling...

My pleasure! Thank you for reading and sharing it so enthusiastically!

But of course – if Shakespeare is the standard you set to measure against, then Modern English falls short. If you compare Cantiorix against Cicero, you're allowed to make the judgement that it misses the mark in many ways

The Latin may be bad by classical standards in lettering, vocab and grammar ("iacit" here is more properly 'he throws'), but the number of such inscriptions across western Britain I find so interesting – when compared with the east, with England-to-be. Were they destroyed there, or never made?

Two Celtic personal names, a Celtic region, two Latin titles left by the Romans, and a Christian formula ("hic iacit") – a snapshot in nine words of Wales immediately after the official rule of Rome.

A replica of the stone with the Cantiorix inscription, standing in the ground next to a slate wall

"cantiori hic iacit venedotis cive fuit [c]onsobrino ma[g]li magistrati"

('Cantiori here lies, of Gwynedd a citizen he was, a cousin of Maglus the magistrate')

Still fascinated by the 6th-cent. Cantiorix Inscription, from sub-Roman north Wales, bearing the first mention of the Kingdom of Gwynedd.

I have been WAITING for a journalist to write this story.

I specialize in manuscripts produced in England between 1300 and 1500. If this had occurred in the midst of writing my dissertation or first book, it would have exploded my career.

After Sheikh: what next for Bangladesh? | The Intelligence from The Economist

Distilled podcast version of my review of @dannybate.bsky.social 's WHY Q NEEDS U : shows.acast.com/theintellige...

Initial /sk/ is typically indicative of Norse origin, but the location of Skirmish Paintball far outside the old Danelaw suggests Celtic instead. The specifier 'Paintball' indicates a dispersed cluster of Skirmish villages; consult Domesday for hamlets of Skirmish Lazertag, Skirmish Escaperoom, etc.

Road sign for 'Skirmish Paintball'

How delightfully quaint some of these old Devon village names are, their etymologies lost in the mists of time.

Commemorations of the Velvet Revolution (Czech: sametová revoluce) here today, giving me an excuse to post about the word samet 'velvet'.

Ultimately, it's actually from Ancient Greek – specifically from hexámitos 'six-threaded', an origin it shares with the Modern German word, Samt.

Great! Do that instead, and maybe stop stealing copyrighted ideas to fuel your energy-guzzling sycophancy engine that hallucinates fake facts and endangers vulnerable users? Just a thought…

Bravo!

It hadn't clicked until this evening that the Czech for 'yes' and the name of the soon-to-be governing ANO party sound quite funny in Spanish

Fluency was assisted – nay, encouraged – by the beer

Living my best linguistic life tonight, after a long pub session involving a Englishman (me), a Spaniard, and a Czech (well, a Moravian), for whom the common language of conversation is Czech

Pope Leo absolutely cooking

🤔

What a lovely response, thank you! And would you say more about this anti-whine-wine schooling? As much as you like to share

For anyone interested in linguistics/the development of the English language, this is a fascinating piece (& the examples helped me test my Middle English, which was fun). Despite being from southern England, I was actually taught at school to pronounce w and wh differently: a quirk, it would seem!