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

About this episode

This episode features an interview with Dr. Danny Bate discussing the complexities of reconstructing Proto-Indo-European and recent advancements in the field.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Gretchen McCulloch

Guest: Danny Bate

Topics covered

• Proto-Indo-European
• linguistics
• language history
• word order
• archaeology
• genetics

Keywords

• Proto-Indo-European
• linguistics
• Danny Bate
• language reconstruction
• archaeological evidence
• alphabet history

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: A Language I Love Is...

Books & works: Why Q Needs U, Proto

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