Before there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have long been fascinated by the quest to get a glimpse into what Proto-Indo-European must have looked like through careful comparisons between languages we do have records for, and this very old topic is still undergoing new discoveries.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the process of figuring out Proto-Indo-European with Dr. Danny Bate, public linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is…, and author of the book Why Q Needs U. We talk about why figuring out the word order of a 5000-year-old language is harder than figuring out the sounds, and a great pop linguistics/history book we’ve both been reading that combines recent advances in linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence to reexamine where these ancient Proto-Indo-European folks lived: Proto by Laura Spinney. We also talk about Danny’s own recent book on the history of the alphabet, featuring fun facts about C, double letters, and izzard!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about celebratory days, years, decades, and more with some relationship to linguistics! We recently learned that people in the UK have been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th and many lingcommers are excited about the idea of taking those celebrations international: World Linguistics Day, anyone? What we learned putting this episode together is that celebratory days take off when groups of people decide to make them happen so…let’s see how many different locations around the world we can wish each other Happy World Linguistics Day from this year!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Danny Bate on Bluesky and Twitter
‘Why Q Needs U’ by Danny Bate, on Amazon and Bookshop (affiliate links)
Danny Bate’s ‘A Language I Love Is…’ podcast (Gretchen’s episode about Montreal French and Lauren’s episode about Yolmo)
‘Proto; How One Ancient Language Went Global’ by Laura Spinney on Amazon and Bookshop (affiliate links)
‘Proto-Indo-European and Laura Spinney’ on Danny Bate’s ‘A Language I Love Is…’ Podcast
Simon Roper on YouTube
Jackson Crawford on YouTube
Wikipedia entry for ‘Czech language’
Wikipedia entry for ‘Old Church Slavonic’
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