110: The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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: https://pod.link/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMjIxNjI5NzcyMA Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/800779835062484992/transcript-episode-110-danny-interview 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: https://www.patreon.com/posts/142860621 For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/800779694367703040/lingthusiasm-episode-110-the-history-of-the

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingheasism, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:23.4	I'm Gretchen McCallick.
0:24.6	And today, we're getting enthusiastic about the ancient history of languages in Europe and its neighbors.
0:30.4	And I'm here with Dr. Danny Bate, who's a public linguist, the host of the podcast, A Language I Love is, and author of Why Q Needs You. But first,
0:40.2	a brief announcement. Our most recent bonus episode was about World Linguistics Day, which is
0:45.6	November 26th, coming up very soon, and other more and less obscure linguistics-related holidays,
0:51.9	decades, anniversaries, and kinds of special days, and how those get
0:55.9	created. You can go to patreon.com slash enthusiasm to listen to this and many other bonus episodes
1:02.4	and help us keep the show running. Hello, Danny.
1:16.6	Hi, Gretchen.
1:17.5	Thank you for coming on, Lincathusiasm.
1:19.6	Thank you so, so much for having me.
1:21.7	This is surreal, safe to say, as a long-time listener to Lincthusiasm.
1:27.2	To be on it, myself is... I don't really know how I'm feeling right now, but I'll just be pinching myself while we're recording, if that's okay. Well, if you start zoning out because you think that you're supposed to just be listening and not actually participating in the conversation, I'll give you a little poke or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Thank you. Thank you. I'll be there sitting
1:44.5	like, this guy is talking about, I know, I like these topics. I like these topics. Yeah. So before we get
1:53.5	into talking about your work and history of English and other languages, let's start with a
1:59.6	question that we start with all of our
2:00.8	guests. How did you get into linguistics? Right. Okay, great question. It involves a little
2:05.4	bit of personal history and the short answer is, I don't know. There must have been a time when I
2:13.4	wasn't into linguistics. There must have been. I have clear memories of thinking that, you know, foreign languages are silly and what's the point of this and why do I have to go to school
2:21.4	and other such childish impulses. But, you know, it is hard to pin down when I realized that
2:28.9	in linguistics was a thing and that it was the thing for me. Because I, you know, like so many people of my generation, it wasn't talked about at school.
	...

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