U.S. publication day for A History of England in Twenty-Five Poems, with Pegasus Books. 🎉🎉 They picked a different author photo - looking suitably studious... www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Hist...

Reading Peter Roach's 'English Phonetics and Phonology', I was charmed by this table of possible tri-consonant combinations at the start of English syllables – specifically, by its gaps. Surely poets and wordsmiths have a duty to fill in the gaps by creating words starting stl-, spw- and stw-.

Dearest @dannybate.com and the one and only ŋə together in one video!? I'm sure it'll start snowing in a minute, because Christmas came early! www.youtube.com/watch?v=s461...

The Cursed History of the Alphabet -- Why Q Needs U (with Danny Bate!)

YouTube video by Agma Schwa

youtube.com

Behind the bewildering transformation of British universities, are management consultants being paid millions Really proud to have this vital piece on our unis are being gutted from the inside by @jheathershaw.bsky.social on Democracy for Sale. Do read democracyforsale.substack.com/p/inside-bri...

Inside Britain's university crisis

As teaching staff face job loss, their bosses have netted pay rises and bought advice from a “vampiric” management consultancy, writes Prof. John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter

democracyforsale.substack.com

It being a Lammas night, I was reading Burns' Corn Rigs and realised I didn't know where the -ley in barley comes from. Turns out the Old English for barley is bærlīċ 'barley-like'. Are there other examples of x-like becoming the word for x?

Let me get this straight: From Sweden, via Finnic, come words for the Rus and Russia. The Mongols turn the Russian term into Oros, to avoid initial /r/. Mandarin Chinese gains this as 俄羅斯 (Éluósī), 俄 for short. Then, due to the Vietnamese reading of the character 俄, 'Russia' in Vietnamese is Nga.

@dannybate.com & @agmaschwa.bsky.social is not a crossover I was expecting! youtu.be/s461jPFnhoI

The Cursed History of the Alphabet -- Why Q Needs U (with Danny Bate!)

YouTube video by Agma Schwa

youtu.be

Using lists of three is not an "AI tell." It's a common trait in human writing because our brains biologically want to make sure there's always one thing to marry, one thing to fuck, and one thing to murder.

Was just realizing how many books by my friends I currently have on my desk! Yay Bluesky! @moudhy.bsky.social @norsebysw.bsky.social @dannybate.com @susiedentwords.bsky.social (N.B. I've only met one of these in person, and haven't even corresponded with others. Nonetheless they're my friends.)

Czech blunder #34,842 (acknowledged immediately upon being uttered): What I wanted to say: they all got fired (všichni dostali padáka) What I actually said: they all got a shot of alcohol (všichni dostali panáka)

Given that Rome often overshadows Greece and Latinization is so frequent, it’s only fair we try to give exact transliterations when rendering Greek names. As they say, an ai for an ae.

I went with an academically grounded account of the Great Vowel Shift in Chapter E of WQNU, rather than my pet theory that it was all a joke that got out of hand.

David@edinburgensis.bsky.social · last wk.

I've posted some good books I discovered via Bluesky. This great wee book was a youtube find. It's full of rabbit holes of language including an intelligible, and so to me interesting, summary of the Great Vowel Shift. My thanks to @norsebysw.bsky.social for having @dannybate.com on his channel.

Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.

I've posted some good books I discovered via Bluesky. This great wee book was a youtube find. It's full of rabbit holes of language including an intelligible, and so to me interesting, summary of the Great Vowel Shift. My thanks to @norsebysw.bsky.social for having @dannybate.com on his channel.

“Horse” & “car” are from the same word. I swear: Since *ḱ / *k regularly become *h in a Germanic language like English, “horse” is the expected outcome of Proto-Indo-European *ḱr̥sós. But we also borrow that word back from Gaulish (via Latin; two languages where *k > *h doesn’t happen) as “car.”

V interesting thread on reading for pleasure in the UK. Whenever people ask my parents how all three of their kids went to uni, despite all the obstacles, my dad says that they encouraged us to read. We went to libraries and charity shops for books - and a common theme in this thread is libraries.

Louie Stowell@louiestowell.bsky.social · last wk.

Ok, it's time for Finally Read The Longread Tabs I Have Open Sunday! This one's a LONG one...the edcuation select committee report on reading for pleasure. publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5902/cm...

Nor are the Etruscans "mysterious" as such – the weird thing is not that non-IE languages existed in Europe. If anything, the weird thing is that there weren't more!

Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · last wk.

It so irritates me when some popular media keeps portraying Etruscan as "undeciphered", more or less. Its not – it just has a corpus that doesn't give us super much to work with. A lot of what we do have is quite understandable, and has been for a long time now.

I quite like the sound of chilometer. It feels archaic but friendly - like to-day, or connexion.

A few cases of chilomètre and chiliometre can be found in use but the original French law (gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...) used the kilo- spelling; I wonder if anyone raised the spelling issue at draft stage. I want to know what happened to the myriamètre (10 km)...

Bulletin des lois de la République française

Bulletin des lois de la République française -- 1795-03-01 -- fascicules

gallica.bnf.fr

The word "Satan" (الشيطان) written with an inverted letter nūn (ن) in the Arabic version of the Book of Job in MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. ar. 468.

The common charge against English spelling is that it's too historical, at the cost of sounds. One counterexample is 'kilo-'. Such measurements come, via French, from Greek χίλιοι 'thousand'. We'd expect this to be rendered in French and English as 'chilo-', but a K ensured the right pronunciation.

Today in "extremely low frequency vocabulary items sometimes acquire wildly different connotations in their different paradigmatic forms" Smite, smote, smitten

From a 2022 Tweet by linguist and author @dannybate.com. Taken in Peebles, a town in the Scottish borders. I was as amused by it as he apparently was and saved it. (He also had a monthly podcast, “A Language I Love Is,” although it’s been quiet since March.) I haven’t managed to go see it myself.

Cities dismantled their tram networks to become “motor cities of the future”. The result? You could travel further within 30 mins via public transport in 1957 than you can in 2026. Cities are seeking billions to rebuild networks. Incredible piece of work this.

The Exchange@theexchangeleeds.bsky.social · 2w ago

If you stood on Briggate at 8am on a weekday in 1957, and stood there again in 2026, in which year could you reach more of the city in half an hour? Samuel Bancroft has crunched the numbers. Since the 1950s, Leeds has got bigger - but the city has effectively shrunk.

*Shuts down laptop.* I think that's enough internet for today. *Picks up phone* Let's see what the pocket-sized internet is doing.

Interesting and hilarious!

Dr Danny Bate@dannybate.com · 2w ago

I rarely write about Homer, being daunted by the topic, but since the poet is having a moment, here's a piece about the alphabet, writing, and their absence in the epics. Inspired by a chat with @viewsproject.bsky.social, I hesitantly suggest a theory for that absence. dannybate.com/2026/07/24/h...

There's an Arabic version of this as well The 6th-c king of Al-Ḥīrah (Iraq), ʿAmr ibn Hind, felt insulted by satirical verses composed by the young poet Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd and his uncle, Al-Mutalammis. The king sought revenge:

An excellent post on writing (or not writing) in Homer's epics by @dannybate.com!

Dr Danny Bate@dannybate.com · 2w ago

I rarely write about Homer, being daunted by the topic, but since the poet is having a moment, here's a piece about the alphabet, writing, and their absence in the epics. Inspired by a chat with @viewsproject.bsky.social, I hesitantly suggest a theory for that absence. dannybate.com/2026/07/24/h...

I rarely write about Homer, being daunted by the topic, but since the poet is having a moment, here's a piece about the alphabet, writing, and their absence in the epics. Inspired by a chat with @viewsproject.bsky.social, I hesitantly suggest a theory for that absence. dannybate.com/2026/07/24/h...

Homer’s ABCs

Or: Why don’t people in the Iliad and Odyssey write anything down? Sing, goddess, of how Homer is all the rage right now. My timelines have become streams of Nolan-inspired analyses, hot takes and …

dannybate.com