Well, the better side is obviously Yorkshire, so I can't guess where you're based!

Are you based in Leeds?? I had the wrong end of the stick entirely!

Pretty nervous ahead of recording this, but @gretchenmcc.bsky.social as interviewer put me at ease so quickly, and had both the generosity of spirit and the expertise to let me go on about a big range of topics!

On the subject of (2), what still vexes you?

Thank you reading it and for saying so! I really appreciate these personal endorsements

1) What sort of thing would you like to read? Something linguistico-historical? Something like? Ostler's Empires of the Word
2) Sound change! First to a long O-vowel, then a diphthong, as with 'stone' and 'oak'

The physical thing will be out next year, February at the earliest, but the audio version should be available for your ears next week!

Very soon! Hopefully next week or the next. And thank you for your interest in it!

Happy birthday, Alex!

Arguably, they spoke it so well and often that they gave it the full means and motive to become another language...

... but a serious answer would be recommending this video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2TW...

Good, I can write a sequel!

The (Old) Czech form samet was most probably the source of Yiddish samet סאַמעט, because with its initial s- (and not z-) the word cannot come from Early New High G Sammet (< MHG samît, samât etc), and definitely not from ModG Samt.

Ah, that's good to know, thanks!

Kindle has endnotes, not footnotes? 😮 I'm rather down about this, I think many of my 'jokes' depend on immediacy. Can you at least click on their number to be taken straight to them?

You make a good point! I suppose we can judge it against the classical language of earlier centuries, because that language was still around – people always preserved and tried to emulate it (and still do), but the Latin of these stones suggests its author didn't have access to it

Danny deliciously writes about the linguistic aftermath of the Gregorian reform and some unexpected developments in Slavic-speaking area.
The icing on the cake for me is the Trilingual Heresy, one I had never heard of.
Thank so much Danny !

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triling...

My pleasure! Thank you for reading and sharing it so enthusiastically!

But of course – if Shakespeare is the standard you set to measure against, then Modern English falls short. If you compare Cantiorix against Cicero, you're allowed to make the judgement that it misses the mark in many ways

The Latin may be bad by classical standards in lettering, vocab and grammar ("iacit" here is more properly 'he throws'), but the number of such inscriptions across western Britain I find so interesting – when compared with the east, with England-to-be. Were they destroyed there, or never made?

Two Celtic personal names, a Celtic region, two Latin titles left by the Romans, and a Christian formula ("hic iacit") – a snapshot in nine words of Wales immediately after the official rule of Rome.