Dr Danny Bate

The starring linguists were:
@jesszafarris.com, @languagewriter.bsky.social, @marcofranconeves.bsky.social and @linguisticdiscovery.com. I'll be sharing some interesting snippets (such as Jess on AI and Marco's books in Brazil and Galicia) on Instagram and YouTube, as soon as I figure out how.

YouTube video by Danny Bate Public linguistics: Interview with Jess Zafarris, Gaston Dorren, Marco Neves and Daniel W. Hieber

A month ago, I spent an evening in the virtual company of four lovely linguists, who I got to share their perspectives on public linguistics and writing for general audiences. A good time was had by speakers and attendees alike, so I've made the full chat available:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ol...

Enhanced image of palimpsested page, original writing in red; a large illuminated 'E' can be seen in bottom right quadrant.

Somehow, an 8th-c. English liturgical manuscript ended up in Mount Sinai (where it was palimpsested and written over by a Christian Arabic scribe). For more info: Michelle Brown, austriaca.at/0xc1aa5572%2...

It's a common unstressed vowel in a lot of English accents, heard for example in the -ES (roses, churches, judges) and -ED (gutted, padded, legged) endings
bsky.app/profile/dann...

It's a common unstressed vowel in a lot of English accents, heard for example in the -ES (roses, churches, judges) and -ED (gutted, padded, legged) endings
bsky.app/profile/dann...

Now available for preorder (hardback) in the US! Or on Kindle right now!

It seems ironic that the vowel sound in schwa is not a schwa.

I have to wonder whether your sixth-grade teacher was Dwight Schrute

(Compare 'roses' with 'Rosa's')
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_...

After your ears have unlocked the full power of schwa, they can then grasp an even greater English sound: schwi.

Brilliant!! I'm so pleased, this is exactly the response I hoped for when writing the book. Thank you!

How to stop a dictator I spent months studying how authoritarians like Trump lose. The answer is shockingly simple.

I have spent the past several months studying the cutting-edge research on modern democracies that have defeated authoritarian leaders.

I've learned that the conventional wisdom on the topic is wrong — in ways that have clear implications for the US going forward

THREAD www.vox.com/politics/479...

That's right. You can see it written "בשם" here, translated as 'sweet smell':
biblehub.com/text/isaiah/...

The same idea! The word comes from Semitic, later borrowed into Greek. Hebrew today pronounces its letter ש as /s/, but it was most likely the lateral sound /ɬ/ in antiquity (like the Welsh LL). This is reflected in Greek βάλσαμον, and from there the LS of 'balsamic'.

Concerned friends might say I'm procrastinating by reading about historical Semitic phonology again.

But this may be a useful alternative example of languages preserving evidence of ancient sounds in loanwords. I've gone with 'balsamic' quite a few times now.

The Arabic letter ḍād (ض) nowadays represents a D-like sound, but in the classical language, it probably stood for an L-like lateral fricative sound.

A bit of evidence for this in fact comes from Spanish and its word for 'mayor', alcalde. Borrowed from Arabic al-qāḍī, it spells the ḍād with LD.

Exactly how I want all my writing to be read! Indo-Aryan languages are neglected by me in this article for reasons of space, but their feminine I is very much part of the story

This is a great read over a cuppa. Feminine in most of the Indo-European family is marked by ‘a’, so when I was learning Hindi-Urdu a few years ago, I was thrown by masculine ending in ‘ā‘ and feminine ending in ‘ī’ : लड़का/laṛkā = boy, लड़की/laṛkī = girl. #langsky

Makes it fun to figure out the derived forms:

utgift 'expense'
eftergift 'concession'
uppgift 'piece of info'
ingift 'married into'
bortgift 'married off'
motgift 'antidote'

German Gift, with the 'poison' meaning, travelled north into Swedish, but the Swedish lexicon already contained a homophonous word from the same root. Consequently, gift in Swedish means either 'poison' or 'married'.

Mitgift is a German word meaning 'dowry', the 'with-gift' brought by a bride.

This compound preserves the 'giving' sense of the German word Gift, while the bare word itself, influenced by Greek/Latin dosis (a 'dose', literally a 'giving'), has come to mean 'poison'.

Only two settings here:
monk mode and monkey mode

AI will not save us In fact, it's probably going to make our lives much, much worse

In the New Statesman this week, I channel just some of my hatred toward AI Hype into 900 words.

On the grifters and rubes surfing a bubble atop a pyramid, and the economy-shattering fraud the rest of us can no longer escape.

www.newstatesman.com/science-tech...

my two favorite language family distributions

Looks like my book can be useful after all!

YouTube video by Colin Gorrie History of the alphabet: a conversation with Danny Bate

Thank you for this endorsement and sharing!

If you fancy combining the two of us...
- youtu.be/5rlaMWduwyc?...
- shows.acast.com/a-language-i...

How far back in time can you understand English? An experiment in language change

#LangSky Highly recommend @dannybate.bsky.social’s book ‘Why Q Needs U’ and @colingorrie.bsky.social’s post showing 1,000 years of English, jumping back 100 years per section in writing style, spelling, syntax and grammar.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

But does it land in your spam? It comes through to my inbox, my wife's and my friend's okay.

He's right! Although I wouldn't say that's specific to Germanic