#proto language

Gretchen: What area of linguistics did you develop specific interests in?

Danny: I’ve always been very 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. That was always there. 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. 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 had never really thought about before, so that was great fun. Then the epiphany, if there ever was one, that I could then combine it with history. All of that is to say that my specialism, which I went on to hone and refine through 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. That was how I spent four happy years doing my PhD.

Gretchen: What were those really, really old languages that you looked at?

Danny: They were a group of Indo-European languages. I’m confident this is a 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. I set myself the fairly ambitious task of trying to say something about the word order of the single ancestor of this family. We have a good idea about the sounds and the vocabulary of what we call “Proto-Indo-European,” from which all these languages trace decent, 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? These were the big questions. 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, and maybe Hittite, which I kind of really got into through one friend at the end. That’s it.

Gretchen: These are the oldest Indo European languages that we have written evidence for roughly speaking. Is that true?

Danny: 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. To take an example, I included Ancient Greek. I really focused in on what we call “Classical Greek” and “Homeric Greek” (the language of Homer and great poems like The Iliad and The Odessey) 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.

Gretchen: 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.” They’re just not very long. You can’t get a lot of word order out of two or three words.

Danny: Exactly so. You’ve hit the nail on the head. They can be interesting. They can be little more interesting than, say, basic bureaucracy, but it’s a lot of discussion about grain. It’s a lot of praising the dead people that came before you, your father, saying you're somebody’s father. As a syntactician, I can look at these inscriptions and go, “Yep, those are words. They are in an order,” but that’s about all I can say.

Gretchen: You want something that’s more of a narrative or connected story.

Danny: Exactly so, yeah.

Gretchen: The things that I’m familiar with when it comes to Proto-Indo-European – which is the level that I would say an average linguist maybe knows, but I haven’t specialised particularly in the area – are we’ve figured out a lot about the sounds because you can go between the modern-day Indo-European languages and be like, “Ah, 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 this systematic correspondence of F and P.” You can do these sound correspondences. You 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 word order with respect to Proto-Indo-European. Were you able to figure out anything?

Danny: You’ve just very nicely summarised Chapter 1 of my PhD. I was very fortunate because of 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 Krishnan Ram-Prasad at the University of Cambridge, now Oxford, and also George Walkden at the University of Constance, who just, you know, great people, and laid groundwork that I was able to follow. This is a difficult question. 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 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. We can trace them back.” We often say they have “cognancy.” They are cognates, basically – cognate words, cognate sounds. We can follow that back, back to the source.

Gretchen: Can I tell you what my naïve hypothesis is about Proto-Indo-European word order?

Danny: Go for it.

Gretchen: We’ll see if I’m right or if it can be known whether I’m right. I think my naïve 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. When you have a modern-day language like Latin or like 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 a 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. I think if I were guessing, I would say, “Well, maybe Proto-Indo-European also does that because we have reconstructed it to have a bunch of case endings.”

Danny: Yes. That’s the conclusion of my PhD thesis. Well done.

Gretchen: Yes! Victory! Thanks! But with much more evidence I assume because I’m just making this up based on –

Danny: Yeah, it was a little bit longer than our conversation so far. I think it totalled at just shy of 100,000 words eventually, so you’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head. But there were some – what you’ve outlined there is an idea, an understanding of Proto-Indo-European syntax, word order, that is quite old, has a good pedigree to it, there were people in the 19th Century who thought, “C’mon. It must’ve been very flexible. The word endings are doing all the hard work, so it must’ve been free to mess around with these things.” One of the 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. 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 wishes and a handful of uses that we put our sentences to, the word order of Modern English is SVO – subject, verb, object.

Gretchen: Right. 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.

Danny: I’m pretty sure they had cheese, yeah.

Gretchen: 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 “honey.” You have something like, “I like honey” – “I” is the subject, “like” is the verb, and “honey” is the object. That’s English for you.

Danny: Great. And we can mess around with it in English a bit. We can say things like, “That honey I like,” but there’s the sense that it’s not the basic nature of English word order. 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. It didn’t matter so much let’s say the “role” that the different part of the sentence were playing in the overall event. By that I mean the verb (meaning the action), what’s doing the verb, what’s 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 known information between the participants of the discussion out there on the Steppes 6,000 years ago, that’s been put first, very logically, ties the new sentence to what’s come before, whereas the new information tends to come in the middle. That’s something like what you want to impress on somebody tends to be the object, for example, what’s receiving the event, what’s being affected by the ongoing discourse, and then probably the verb comes last. The object, very nicely in that position, probably matched a 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 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 information, that’s old information. A language like Hungarian, for example, works pretty much like this. That was actually one of the fun 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 dunno, cool.

Gretchen: Hang on, I didn’t think Hungarian was an Indo-European language.

Danny: It is not. It is absolutely not. Don’t worry about it. I’m not tricking you here or anything like that.

Gretchen: This is not the Hungarian-is-secretly-Proto-Indo-European hypothesis.

Danny: No, as cool as that is 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-Ugric.” On a larger scale, it’s being called “Uralic.” It’s just fun to speculate about some sort of connection between Uralic and Proto-Indo-European. I can’t do that. It’s a step too far. But I did allude to the fact that if you want to look at something that I think resembles, really closely, the word order of Proto-Indo-European, go to Russia, go to the Mari El Republic, which is part of the Russian Federation, and you’ll find Mari. Mari syntax – it’s – wow – a striking similarity to what I was for totally unrelated reasons trying to propose for Proto-Indo-European.

Gretchen: Is Mari an Indo-European language?

Danny: No, still Uralic.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Okay, all right. But it is good to know that some extant languages do do this type of syntax because it at least validates that this is a thing that languages could do. But, yeah, we can’t know.

Gretchen: When I was in grad school – which was a while ago – I remember learning that there were two competing hypotheses about where exactly these Proto-Indo-European ancestors – we know that there have to be people who spoke this language somehow, but there were 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 it 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 two hypotheses are and how we did some of that figuring out? I know this wasn’t really your area of research, but it’s all related.

Danny: While it may not be my specialism, I’ve done my best to keep track of these developments because 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 – well, actually, in the 17th Century you’ve got people drawing connections between languages. Picks up speed at the end of the 1700s and then kind of blossoms from there.

Gretchen: This is the old school philology field. The philologists were doing some of this comparative work before the term “linguistics” was even coined.

Danny: Exactly so. They really would not have recognised the term “linguistics.” They would’ve recognised the term “philology,” which tended to quite old, had a 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 the idea, the development of the field, is a separate topic, which I’m also very interested in. I think they had different priorities. I think their priorities were – they had all these old texts. They loved texts. They loved all the Latin scholars. They loved Julius Caeser and Cicero and Homer and all that good stuff. They were just noticing these similarities. From that feeling of “How is Homer here and, I dunno, Plautus, a Roman writer, using the same words? What’s going on here?” Different motivations as a field. That’s philology. It’s been around for a long time. We are still making contributions to the foundations that they laid down. I just think that’s so cool. To answer your question, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Where did we think that the Proto-Indo-European people initially came from? There were two competing hypotheses.

Danny: Well, the short answer is that for a long time we thought that they came from basically everywhere. I can find you –

Gretchen: There were many competing hypotheses.

Danny: There have been some. Of course, 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 Central Europe – for reasons that get into very unsavoury areas, quite offensive areas, I find. But we’ve moved away from those ideas. 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 short terms – the “Anatolian hypothesis” and the “Steppe hypothesis.” For geography nerds out there, Anatolia is that large chunk of land that is now today Turkey, surrounded by the Black Sea on one side, Mediterranean on the other side. The idea there is that 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 make sense. It’s good. That’s emerging. It’s Colin Renfrew – Lord Colin Renfrew, he is now. See? Linguistics gets you places. He proposed that I wanna say something like the end of the ’70s. That really, really caught on because he was able to connect it to things like farming, the 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 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. That’s not “step” as in, what, you have steps up to your upstairs. That’s “Steppe” as in double-P-E at the end. This is this huge swath of grassland that roams from Europe through Eurasia, basically, it connects Eurasia as a thing, all the way into Central Asia. It’s a ginormous stretch.

Gretchen: What countries are there in the modern sense?

Danny: I mean, 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 Russian.

Gretchen: 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 is saying, “Ah, they come from Ireland,” and the other hypothesis is like, “No, they come from Sicily,” and those are quite far from each other, so they should leave very distinct evidence. But the Steppe and Turkey are both in that middle point between the Euro side and the Indian side of the Indo-European –

Danny: Exactly, yeah.

Gretchen: But in different spots in that point.

Danny: Two sides of the Black Sea, which means that they have their strengths, which means that they have a lot in common. They were successful as hypotheses for a region. Then I would say really from the 2000s/2010s onwards, 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. Certainly, when I was first getting into Indo-European as a field, it felt like a done deal. One hypothesis has won over the other. And then, of course, in this glorious volte-face of science, roughly – I was actually trying to google this to identify the smoking gun where this change comes from, the earliest I could find, really, was 2018 (couldn’t go much further back than that), a new source of evidence comes to light that really upends the picture. That source of evidence is genetics.

Gretchen: We’ve done a lot of this linguistic history because we have access to languages that are as old as we’ve found. There’s also been a lot of archaeological evidence that’s 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. 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?

Danny: It tells us incredible things, the long and short of it. You’re absolutely right. We should mention there’s the third member of this party, which is archaeology. I think it’s fair to say that archaeology really tipped the scales in favour of the Steppe hypothesis. When people like David Anthony 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 Steppe is where it all comes from. Then the genetics enters the scene. Looking at the early papers, they’re not too focused on Indo-European and people who used these languages. They’re just looking at the dispersal of big groups of people across Eurasia and the Middle East. They start to show that these groups of people that they’re testing – so they’re testing modern-day people. They’re testing skeletons, like DNA that we have preserved in skeletons. They’re showing different amounts from different sources of – basically, they’re showing the movement of people. That is only partly supporting the Steppe hypothesis. It’s definitely lending some weight. Definitely the idea of these Steppe people, known as the “Yamnaya” culture, they’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 this heavy proportion of DNA which seems to come from the south, from south of the Caucasus mountains.

Gretchen: And that’s Anatolia – that’s modern-day Turkey.

Danny: I don’t think it’s where the 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 kind of Anatolia. It’s still the borders of what is today Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan – countries which we kind of call the “Caucasus” region, basically. 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. This is s stick of dynamite. It’s throwing a grenade into the field – and not in a bad way. Because now people’s minds, scholars’ minds, are just racing as things which they had to dismiss to get on board the Steppe 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, somebody at least among these speakers are south of the Caucasus mountains,” but also, for a long time, people have speculated between speakers of Proto-Indo-European and speakers of really old other proto languages from that area, like Proto-Semitic and Proto-Kartvelian. Now, those ideas don’t seem too far-fetched.

Gretchen: This idea that one of the factors in the development of Proto-Indo-European and the split of Indo-European into so many different languages that became both ancient languages and modern languages also happened because of this contact between other groups of people who were already speaking their languages.

Danny: Sure. There you go. It opens up a much wider world of people with whom the language was in contact. Exactly. 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 Steppe Hypothesis is out the window. I think, actually, to summarise 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 it’s coming from what 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. What it is in the Steppe region, to the north of the Black Sea, is what you could call “core” Indo-European – like the core languages that have the closest similarities to each other.

Gretchen: And then what is it in the other region?

Danny: In the other region, then, it’s evolving into things like Anatolian. That language family involves things like Hittite – sadly, no longer with us, RIP – but it’s a great language family that 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.

Gretchen: So, you have Proto-Indo-European as this common language to most of the group, and then you have Proto-Proto-Indo-European, which also includes Hittite (or something, if you wanna call it that).

Danny: 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 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.

Gretchen: 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.”

Danny: I would say that been the consensus. There are alternatives. Some people have talked about “Proto-Indo-Hittite” to indicate the earliest stage that we know about – “Proto-Indo-Anatolian.” There’s all sorts of possible cases. But there’s just something about PIE. It’s caught on. It works. When people use it, they search for alternatives to describe the subsequent stages.

Gretchen: It sort of captures the imagination. I have been reading a recent book called Proto by Laura Spinney which talks about this history and lays the linguistic story, the genetic story, the archaeological story. I think it’s really a great book for history buffs. It’s got so many maps in it of all 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. Is this a book that you would recommend to people?

Danny: Yes. [Laughs] That’s the short answer. Yes, I would. I can safely recommend it, definitely. As you say, Laura Spinney is a journalist by trade, first and foremost. This book – it does reflect that. It does reflect that in many different ways that she has come to the field afresh. She’s used her journalistic skills to identify the best people to talk to about some of these subjects. From my position within the field, if you were to say, “Oh, Danny, who would you talk to about Old Irish?” I’d have a name. I read the book – there he is quoted in this book. 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 who’s good, who can summarise this for me, to get great information out of experts and then package that in a very accessible way.

Gretchen: That’s fantastic. We’ll link to that book as well if people are looking for a book to read yourself or to get as a gift for someone who’s interested in historical things.

Danny: Exactly. I add one thing as well – again, Laura herself totally does not deny this – this is not a classic introduction to the idea of Indo-European. I just wanna say that. If you’re looking for that, the book would surprise you. I don’t wanna say “disappoint” you, but it would be something other. 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 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. That’s linguistics, archaeology, and genetics, which more or less – they’re not talking to each other, these fields. That’s what Laura’s tried to do – to bring them together.

Gretchen: I thought it was really neat because I know the 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 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 short shrift. Because you get this sort of “Okay, and then we have Proto-Indo-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 other languages on the Proto-Indo-European family tree – like Hittite, like Tocharian, 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 broader thing without only focusing on the English aspects of the story. One of the things I liked about the Proto book is there’s a whole chapter on Tocharian. I didn’t know anything about Tocharian before, and now I know a few things! That aspect of things where it was trying to give the whole story of this language and this language family and not just the story that ends with English and 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 wanna go for that?

Danny: There’s a variety of books out there, and all Indo-Europeanists have their favourite one. Usually for sentimental reasons it tends to be the book that opened their eyes to the world of 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 asks you to engage and to think about things and also sets you little puzzles at the end of each chapter – would be Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction by James Clackson, who is at Cambridge. 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. I believe that over the past decade, YouTube linguistics has really experienced a golden age – a flowering of so many accounts. For a friendly, not-too-over-long 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 his starting point for his videos), but there’s lots of Indo-European stuff there, too. Frankly, just searching “Indo-European” into YouTube will bring up good stuff. 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.

Gretchen: One of the things I particularly like that is available on YouTube and I think possibly places like SoundCloud and stuff for audio is audio recordings of this fable that’s been created that we think uses words that the Proto-Indo-Europeans would have known. I’m avoiding saying the name because now I’m second guessing how to pronounce this. It’s /ʃlɛktɹ/’s fable.

Danny: /ʃlɑɪxə/

Gretchen: Schleicher. It’s a fun little fable. 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.

Danny: Absolutely, yes. And people have done that online. There are other 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 crackling fire sounds in the back, mosquitos. You know, close your eyes, and you’re on the Steppe 6,000 years ago. 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 wanna 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.

Gretchen: There’s lot of sheep in it.

Danny: There’s a lot of sheep. Which may not grab the future Indo-Europeanists immediately. It’s a lot of sheep – a lot about hills and that sort of thing – but it is good. I like what you do say there that there had been different renditions. There’s been different attempts to pronounce this fable. There’s been different attempts as well to reconstruct it, to say what sounds it would’ve had. To the extent that the original formulation of Schleicher’s fable by the original author would almost – he wouldn’t really recognise a modern-day version of this because the field has progressed. We have all these things – if you’ve seen any reconstructed Proto-Indo-European – we have all these Hs followed by H1, H2, H3. They’re called “laryngeals.”

Gretchen: The H1, H2, H3 really gets me.

Danny: They’re awesome. I will stand by them. They are awesome. But I get they are a little bit off-putting when you first come to the language.

Gretchen: They look really cool, but I don’t know how to pronounce them.

Danny: There’s a reason for that. Does anybody? That’s the point. We have a great idea. These are hotly contested things. I mentioned them – these three Hs known as “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 progressed.

Gretchen: This is a set of sounds that we think were all produced with the larynx or far down in the throat.

Danny: Ish.

Gretchen: Ish? Sort of where Hs – and they would’ve been different. 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 were 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.

Danny: Exactly so. That is an intro to laryngeals in a nutshell. Nicely done. This is the thing. We have these sounds that must’ve existed, but they left so few traces behind – and enough traces to then make it into the written record. 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 I loved, is that, say, the unthinkable happens and all written English 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’ve said like, “An English speaker from the UK in the year 2025, he can’t have pronounced – there must’ve 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 have my English left in a thousand years’ time –

Gretchen: Then you’re like, “Well, there must’ve been some sort of R-like sound in words like ‘car,’ but he’s not actually saying the R.”

Danny: Exactly. He’s saying, /kɑː/, but he’s saying /hænd/. He clearly has an /æ/ sound, an /ɑ/ sound, and the /ɑ/ is long. Let’s say we have recordings from this strange land of Montreal, where Gretchen McCulloch is speaking. She’s doing something with her sounds as well in saying /kɑɹ/ and /fɑɹm/ if, indeed, you do. You do, don’t you? You’re rhotic?

Gretchen: I’m rhotic, yeah. Canadians are rhotic.

Danny: Canadians are rhotic. Okay, great. But 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.” Indeed, we, today, have the written record of English, and we know that there was. It was a /r/ sound originally. It has since changed. My English is doing its best to absolutely get rid of it once and for all, but it’s leaving effects behind.

Gretchen: Well, except between two vowels, then you have to stick it back in.

Danny: Yes, that’s true. /dɹɑɹɪŋ/ /sɑɹɪŋ/ – it’s getting its revenge.

Gretchen: Speaking of letters, you’ve recently written a book about the history of the English alphabet. 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. We don’t have a ton of time to go through every single letter. That would be a whole audiobook which perhaps you’re recording.

Danny: Yes, I have. Yes. My voice is still recovering.

Gretchen: [Laughs] When I recorded the audiobook of Because Internet, they told me to eat marshmallows to keep my voice up – marshmallows and green apples.

Danny: Okay, where was this advice when I was doing it? Brillant.

Gretchen: The marshmallows are to soothe your throat, apparently, and the green apple are to make you less click-y. I don’t know if either of them work, but I found that bubbly water really helped be a little spa for my muscles.

Danny: I like that, yeah. I mean, I guess all I did was just have plenty of fluids. I can safely say in my entire life I have never been so hydrated.

Gretchen: [Laughs] You have this book about the history of the alphabet. Perhaps we can highlight a few individual things about particular letters, just to give people a bit of a taste.

Danny: Of course.

Gretchen: 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 is “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 a lot.” One of the things that’s always confused me is even if you compare our alphabet with the Greek alphabet, the Greek alphabet goes: alpha, beta, gamma, dot dot dot, kappa – and very clearly 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 – and also G?. We could’ve just borrowed very straightforwardly two different letters, two different sounds. What happened? Can you tell us about this story?

Danny: I mean, gladly. Before I do, I devoted a whole chapter basically to this exact issue, this disagreement between us and the Greeks. For context, the book is Why Q Needs U – a title which I’m still quite proud of to be honest. Every letter gets its own chapter. It goes all the way from chapter A to chapter Z – really by accident. It was just this incredible coincidence the first five letters A, B, C, D, E allowed me to tell a 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, murky origins all the way up to the present day with English. I tackled this exact issue very neatly in Chapter C, the third chapter. 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.

Danny: The thing that I would really emphasize first and foremost is that the Romans were really ruthlessly efficient with their alphabet. Letters generally didn’t stand for more than two sounds. Two was maximum. One was ideal for them. Because they could. They had a free hand, literally, to redesign things. 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 recordings of ancient Romans, it’s a fairly safe thing to say that it’s a /k/, and the /s/ pronunciation comes later. That’s a post-Roman development.

Gretchen: So, our modern-day pronunciation of /sizɹ/ [Caesar] is originally /kɑɪzɹ/.

Danny: It’s /kɑɪsɑɹ/ basically. It’s the name for “emperor” in German is “Kaiser.” 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 vellum (the soft palate) and the back of your tongue. That’s nice. We’ve 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 /kkkkkkk/. It’s not voicing when you say that /k/ sound. It is voiced when you say /g/. Everything’s involved when you say /g/, including your voice box. This difference, that 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 to us via another member of this great story. You didn’t mention them there.

Gretchen: Ah-ha! I deliberately left them out for you.

Danny: You allowed me to have the great reveal. These are the Etruscans.

Gretchen: The mysterious Etruscans.

Danny: These are the Etruscans. The Etruscans are these – 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 flooded by Rome, basically. Rome, which they helped to foster as a state, then drowns them, basically. But they left their mark. It’s still there in “Tuscany,” for example, from “Etruscan.” They’re still kind of around. I love the Etruscans, but 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. It could and did have very different sounds. There’s no essential inventory of sounds that spoken languages need to have. They did not have the sounds /b/, /d/, and /g/ as in, I dunno, “bet,” “debt,” and “get.” They didn’t have these sounds. That’s what the evidence allows us to say. They take a letter like gamma, used for a voiced /g/ sound, and they say, “We like this letter. It’s very nicely shaped. It’s very simple to draw. It’s at the start of our alphabet. It 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 switched off the voicing and sent the letter down a completely different set of tracks. It’s in the throats of the Etruscans that we have our letter C, basically, this big divergence.

Gretchen: Then when the Romans borrowed the subsequent Etruscan gamma – I feel like I wanna call it “kamma” 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 /k/ sound and the /g/ sound. What are we supposed to do?” Well, they could’ve gone back to Greek and borrowed kappa again or reborrowed gamma, but instead they added this little stroke to the C to make what looks like our modern G, which I have particular fondness for as someone with a G at the beginning of my name. 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’re subsequent levels of sound change that lead to both C and G having multiple pronunciations in English and French and other Romance languages. A lot of languages pronounce C in a whole lot of very different ways.

Danny: Exactly.

Gretchen: One of the other things I enjoyed about Why Q Needs U – in this case from Chapter N – was 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 wanna tell us a bit about doubled letters?

Danny: With pleasure because I rely on them for my own name. I’m /dæni/. Even though the second N doesn’t contribute to the nasal-ness of my name, it’s still deserves to be there. If you take it away, I become /dɛɪni/. What’s going on? Definitely my own name I took as a source of immediate inspiration, coupled with the fact, you 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. N is 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 light way, put a bit of my own perspective on these things, and say, “You know, N, it’s great. It’s a pretty dependable letter. It’s doing its job.”

Gretchen: It hasn’t undergone all of these sound changes like C and G and K.

Danny: It’s, you know, N is there. N is there for us as a letter. That’s very nice. Well done, N.

Gretchen: It’s very “depe-N-dable.”

Danny: Okay. [Laughs] Dad jokes, is it? Okay. 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, hence the two Ns in “Danny,” both of which represent the single /n/ sound. It’s there in words like “better” that has two Ts, 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. What are they doing?

Gretchen: But we don’t pronounce a word like “Danny” as “Dan-ny” or “let-ter,” 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.

Danny: No. 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 comes very naturally to us) where basically we double the consonant letter to indicate to the reader that the vowel, the vowel sound before it, is a short one. So, /dæni/, the /æ/ is one of the short vowels of English. Take it away, we get /dɛɪni/, which is not a long vowel, it’s a diphthong, but it’s a bigger vowel.

Gretchen: But historically speaking it was a long vowel, yeah.

Danny: Take a word like “letter,” a word I’ve had to write a lot for this book, take the T away, and the first E changes /litɹ/. We naturally change that.

Gretchen: Or something like /bɪtɹ/ versus /bɑɪtɹ/. You remove that T and suddenly the vowel quality completely changes.

Danny: That’s an even better example because those are two actual words in English. This is the curse of linguists. We can never think of examples off the top of our heads.

Gretchen: But 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 “leter” 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.

Danny: 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), that’s an “instagrammer” and being “instagrammed.” The M gets doubled. We know that we need to double it in a very organic way, otherwise it would be /ɪnstəgɹɛɪmɹ/, which, you know, the vowel.

Gretchen: Which no one says.

Danny: The vowel changes, basically. 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 need to double the M when you’re using derived words.” I just think this is absolutely incredible. It works. It’s efficient. We learn it, I think, very early on. And, 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 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. Quite quickly, we see people using this system to spell words that never had double letters before.

Gretchen: It’s very old. It’s very clever. I had one last letter that I wanted to mention from the 26 chapters. This was the final one, the letter Z, which partly I just wanted to give a plug for resolving the “Should we call it ‘zed’; should we call it ‘zee’?” 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, so that you can have regrets about not being able to get everything in even before the book is barely out.

Danny: Mm-hm. I already have a few but go on.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Sorry. This is a story about why even though the Oxford English Dictionary recommends the spellings in I-Z-E in words like “analyze” and “realize” things like that, why current British usage (or the usage that we currently consider British) is to use the S for those words. This comes from the history of language settings in spell check in Microsoft Word. The classic advice is “Use S, use Z, it doesn’t matter, just be consistent within a document.” Spell checks can’t handle this. They’re too dumb. They can only handle “I will recommend only this one or only that one.” Because the American usage was so strongly in favour of Z, and the British usage had always allowed both, when the British spell check was invented, it only recommended the S because they wanted people to be consistent within a document. This led to a tremendous uptick in terms of I-S-E use as if it was this British thing, which it’s only been for about 20 years.

Danny: I love that.

Gretchen: And people don’t question the spell check. If spell check tells you this must be the British way to do it, okay, I guess I better do it.

Danny: This is a great story. This is why you wrote Because Internet, and I didn’t, basically. I made my piece with that. I could not write that incredible book. But no, I do nod to spell checkers a couple of times only in passing because that is a very fair point. We think that spell checkers work for our language, that they’re shaped by our language. It’s kind of the other way around. Spell checkers enforce language. They direct us.

Gretchen: I’m always fighting with spell check 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 “realize” because to me this merger – and there’s never been a spell check system (still in 2025) that actually does the level of hybridity that I want from a Canadian spell check system. Even when I set it to Canadian English it doesn’t do that.

Danny: Fair enough. And then people in my homeland, in the UK, might be thinking, “Oh, yes, I-S-E. Proudly British. Woo!” It’s not that old. The Oxford English Dictionary tells that you shouldn’t do.

Gretchen: It’s only been since like 1999.

Danny: Yes, it’s as old as Microsoft.

Gretchen: People have such strong opinions about it that we made t-shirts and other merch that say, “Not judging your grammar just analysing it.” 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. 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,” that now we have both versions.

Danny: Okay. Yeah, I think that’s being good linguists, I think.

Gretchen: You can get a little bit of linguistic data from which one someone picks.

Danny: I love it. Yes. Monitor your sales. See how it’s going.

Gretchen: Danny, thanks so much for coming on Lingthusiasm. If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would that be?

Danny: It’s very tempting at this point to attempt some big, lovely general statement about languages and linguistics. So, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. I love this field. I’ve done my best through podcasts, tweets, now a book to share that love with people. 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. I 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 and 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 together and making cooperation possible, i.e., writing. We do it all over again. That’s what I impress upon people – when you study linguistics, humanity just starts to look great.

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Gretchen: 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/transcripts. You can follow @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, bouba and 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/merch.

Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren’s social media and blog is Superlinguo.

You can follow our guest, Danny Bate, on Bluesky @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 U.

Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna 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 wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to 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 translation process was like; an episode all about antonyms, synonyms, and other more esoteric kinds of -nyms; and an episode about World Linguistics Day and other linguistic-related periods of time.

Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Or leave us a nice review like this one from sarah11112 who said, “This podcast is super interesting and light-hearted. The hosts are great to listen to, and the podcast reveals a lot of information without being dense or dry. Fantastic in every way. :)”

Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Danny: Stay lingthusiastic!

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