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And a fairly recent shift too – Byron rhymes without it! (As discussed in Chapter W of WQNU)

Dave the pub joker, London, c. 1400: 'lads, whY dOn't wE prOnOUnce OUr vOWels all wEIrd' The lads: 'hahaha, whY not'

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.

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.

Someone going to the trouble of buying, reading and now promoting a book will make an author's day – mine's made by this! Thank you, David. I also welcome this as reassurance about Chapter E, the chapter I to this day am most unsure about!

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.

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!

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)...

'Quilo-' would certainly have given the new measurements a certain je ne sais kuoi

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

The etymologist must sometimes admit that humans often just do be making noises

Blimey, this is a blast from my past!

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.