Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 100, decoding English.

So this is episode 100, and I thought it might be a good time to do a special episode

to commemorate the accomplishment.

When I first began the podcast, I had planned to do 100 episodes in total, with about 25

dedicated to each period covered in the podcast, pre-English, Old English, Middle English,

and Modern English.

I actually maintained that plan for a while, but I abandoned that idea sometime back.

So rather than this being the culmination of the podcast, it's just an anniversary episode.

I thought this might be a good time to discuss the overall arc of the podcast, where we've

been and where we're going.

And I'm wedging this episode between the regular episodes, so hopefully you won't have to

wait the full three weeks before the next episode.

For some time now, I've been wanting to discuss the way that sound changes provide clues

about the origin of English words.

If we go back and look at all the specific sound changes I've covered in the podcast, and

put them together, we can actually come up with a set of general rules that can help us

identify where a particular word came from.

These rules can help us figure out if a word is a native Old English word, or a lone word

from another language.

So this time I want to do a quick review of the basic sound changes we've covered over

the past 100 episodes, and I want to point out how we can use those changes to decode

...