This from @dannybate.com is about how Indo-European split elements of words and rearranged them (for phono, for fun?) across an utterance: tmesis, the common ancestors of prefixes and prepositions, that sort of thing… And it’s abso-bloody-lutely fasci-bloody-nating! #langsky

Biggest comeback in history? 999: Icelanders convert to Christianity & ditch Norse myth↩️ 1200's: Snorri Sturluson uses the power of euhemerism to make Norse myth biblical↩️ 1930's: a very Catholic Norse scholar pilfers the edda for character names↩️ 2026: Pope quotes a character called Gandalf 🇮🇸👑

Here's a new long read from me, which is a return to a question from my PhD days, to a prehistoric time when prefixes were a lot more free, and to a bit of ancient syntax that got away from me. dannybate.com/2026/05/25/e...

This is a lovely and thoughtful piece about arriving in Cardiff as an international student to discover a whole new language awaits you. > this is how a place tells you “We are more than one thing.” That's a line that applies to so many aspects of life. Fyi @lingthusiasm.com @dannybate.com

Words such as 'museum', 'formula', and 'ratio' instantly give away their Latin origin, but 'wall', 'street', and 'kitchen' come from Latin too! These were borrowed very early: into Proto-West Germanic, the ancestor of English. Today’s graphic shows six construction terms. Next time: food words.

New podcast episode! We talked to @dannybate.com about his new book about the history of the alphabet, "Why Q needs U" -- a very fun conversation! www.alliterative.net/podcast/2026...

If you spoke Old English and were boiling something, you'd use the verb sēoþan – from which English today gets two very distinct words: - From its infinitive/present tense, we get 'seethe', now used for strong emotions. - From its past participle ġesoden ('boiled, cooked'), we also get 'sodden'.

We weedled the word out of him. Danny is fascinating. For goodness sake, give it a watch.

Did someone say "family tree"? 😄 www.aidanem.com/images/writi...

Yours truly was made very welcome on the multi-platform etymological phenomenon that is Words Unravelled with @jesszafarris.com and @robwords.com. It's the only interview to date in which I've said the word 'boobs'. youtu.be/EqaYS3vWKGY?...

Great discussion with @dannybate.bsky.social about the alphabet. It was fascinating, at least for nerds like me. youtu.be/EqaYS3vWKGY?... But I'm the kid who was fascinated by the shavian alphabet when I was about 7.

A lovely ancient etymology is that Akkadian had the word unnedukku for 'letter' (the kind you send), borrowed from Sumerian – not a Sumerian word, but rather a phrase meaning 'may you say to them'. It was a common initial request to a fellow scribe, for them to read out the letter to its recipient.

finding it hard to put into words just quite upsetting I find the idea of Google getting rid of the "ten blue links" format of search entirely, genuinely feels like your landlord announcing he's removing your kitchen and replacing it with a bouncy castle, I need my kitchen, let me keep my kitchen

A "profound and often tragic" story of language extinction and preservation - my FT review of @sophiasgaler.bsky.social's beautiful and moving new book as.ft.com/r/0eaf8f40-d...

Apparently a couple years ago I made a chart of the crazy things that have become of *pénkʷe. I just stumbled across it cleaning up:

Oh my god, how was I not aware that Pompeii was from a word for 'five'? Love how similar it ended up to some of its more distant Indo-European cousins, like Welsh 'pump' and its close cognates in some of the yan-tan-tethera sheep-counting systems (like Cumbrian 'pimp')

First visit to the British Museum for me in ten years, and now of course I'm most interested in its samples of the ancient alphabet, like this lovely text from Pompeii in the Oscan language. It's a product of a Pompeii's pre-Roman and pre-Latin days – its very name coming from the Oscan for 'five'.

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

I have a personal career goal, which is that I'll have 'made it' when I can introduce myself as an author without cringing. Failed the test at Stansted passport control just now, clearly still some way to go.

Czech blunder #34,841: What I wanted to say: they've built a new crossroads (křižovatka) What I actually said: they've built a new Way of the Cross (křížová cesta)

Školy, nemáte v úterý 2. 6. chuť na jazyk a literaturu? Pokud ano, přijďte na festival DEN ČEŠTINY! Přednášky, workshopy, informace, zážitky, roboti, humory. V centru Prahy a zdarma. Už se začínáme plnit. 👩‍🏫 🎤 🖊️ Program najdete zde, dole je odkaz na přihlášení: www.dencestiny.ff.cuni.cz/program/

This summary of different early medieval literature is still one of my favourite things on the internet. #medievalsky

Formal motion to rename the technology

Exciting new publication! Christian Arabic manuscripts are very important for understanding the medieval history of Arabic, and an informed approach that gives agency to the users of this interesting expression is very important. It's also Open Access! www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

Amidst all the promotion I've been doing recently focused on WQNU, I'm grateful to Laurel of the Linguistics Careercast for having me on – this great show gave me a space to speak frankly about linguistics, PhDs, academic jobs and personal identity. www.linguisticscareercast.com/podcast/epis...

'Sir' began life as the unstressed form of 'sire' used before names. Through this, 'sir' had its original long vowel shortened, saving it from the Great Vowel Shift – unlike 'sire'. But 'sir' did undergo a merger of vowels, thanks to which it could get respelled 'sur-' in the derived word 'surly'.

In "1st", "2nd", "3rd", should we take "1" etc. as a logogram that has 'first' as a secondary value besides 'one', with a phonetic complement "-st" (so like, FIRST-st)? Or is 'one-st' replaced by 'first' morphologically? 🤔

The Venerable Bate, your SOV article was called out on Reddit. www.reddit.com/r/IndoEurope... @dannybate.bsky.social

Brilliant to meet up with the amazing @dannybate.bsky.social - author of the unputdownable book Why Q Needs U and general excellent person. We popped into the Museum of Writing exhibition @senatehouselib.bsky.social - right up Danny's street, of course! I can't recommend his book highly enough!

@dannybate.bsky.social This slide from a talk at the conference I’m attending made me think of you. The alphabet as magic, in curse tablets found in Roman Britain 😁

Just finished “Why Q needs U” by @dannybate.bsky.social and chat, lemme tell you, this book is *phenomenal*. Who knew that the letter ⟨K⟩ was actually the comeback kid of the English alphabet?

Literally me having this problem today as well. Digital resources are so fragile. There are at least three that I used regularly that are either gone or disappear for long stretches.

Really excited to share this new paper. It's been a pet project of mine for almost three years. Words that LOOK like their meanings ("bed", "bubble", "look") are processed faster on lexical decision tasks. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

I've been reading a fun book about English orthography and the story I keep telling people is about 'salmon', which had an L in it in the Latin version but by the time the English started writing it down was like, saumon or similar...

A nice historical detail at the Pilsner Urquell brewery: the signature of Franz Joseph I in the visitors' book, with a visible correction halfway through – the emperor remembering that he's also King of Bohemia, and currently in Bohemia, so he ought to write the Czech version 'František Josef'.

Why isn't it spelled 'Inglish'? Continuing a personal tradition of posing linguistic questions that people were content to leave unasked, here's a new piece from me about why we write 'English' – a "sound-symbol anomaly" and a victory of emotion over logic. dannybate.com/2026/05/01/t...

Semantic shifts are just great in their unpredictability. In the abstract, a word for 'linen, canvas' coming to mean 'great, super' seems very unlikely, but this is the change behind Austrian German's positive adjective and exclamation 'leiwand'!

'Paradise' comes, via Greek parádeisos, from Persian, originally referring to a garden or other enclosed space. Either the Persian or the Greek was also taken into Arabic as farādīs, yet this happened to look like an Arabic plural, so a new singular was back-formed for it: firdaws.

(Hearing) people have different ways of counting on their fingers in France vs America, which is visible in the etymologies of American Sign Language's descent from Old French Sign (VLSF). ASL sometimes matches the American system, sometimes the French, and sometimes neither: #DeafHistoryMonth

In the early stages of my Ancient Greek lessons at school (with the Athenaze textbook! oh, the nostalgia breaks my heart!) I remember learning this word and being amazed that the same 'geo-' I knew from 'geography', 'geology', 'geostationary', etc. had been hiding in 'George' all along

And of course Greek ἔργον <érgon> doesn't just mean "work", but is formally identical to the English word "work"! érgon ← *wérgon ← *wérǵom → *werką → weorc → work

Having listened to approximately 20 episodes of Dr. Bate's “A Language I Love Is” podcast this week (driving listening material for Sefirah) I cannot help but hear this post in my head, complete with accompanying background music

I may as well reshare it myself 😇

For St George's Day, here's a thing about the name 'George': it's ultimately Greek in origin, and a compound of two familiar elements. Ancient Greek geōrgós means 'farmer, peasant', literally 'earth-worker'. It comprises the roots gê 'earth' (hence 'geography') and érgon 'work' (hence 'energy').

Happy St George’s Day! St George is, as far as I know, the only saint venerated by both Christians and Muslims AND worshipped as a god by pagans in the medieval Baltic

"My name is Ea-nāṣir, merchant of copper: Look on my ingots, thou Nanni, and despair!"

Yours truly is the guest on the latest episode of the Time Team podcast. A subset of British Millennials will understand the feelings evoked by that old theme music, followed by my voice.

Happy 80th to Tim Curry, a man who knows how to overact *just* the right amount. youtu.be/U_U59u69tys?...