Dr Danny Bate

Dare I hope for a reference to a recent acclaimed book, written to make this exact point?

I wondered myself! There doesn't seem to be any official infrastructure taking people to the island, but neither is there any obvious reason why people couldn't take a private boat over to it. It's just there, sitting largely ignored in the landscape...

Thank you!

Vltava, Sázava, Mumlava: A Mumble of Voices Almost Lost Local rivers, specifically just one bit of them, have had me reflecting on lost language and the flow of time again. No one will be surprised by this. I recently descended from the heights of an en…

I passed the island on a hike to where the Sázava meets the Vltava. On the weekend before that, I slid and slipped along the Mumlava. So, I've been spending lots of time with Czech rivers ending in -ava, itself a product of undercurrents of linguistic prehistory:
dannybate.com/2026/03/10/v...

An island in the middle distance, viewed from higher up, covered in trees and the low-lying ruins of a monastery

This is as close as I could get on Sunday to the lonely ruins of Ostrov Monastery, on its island in the Vltava.

The monastery was active between the 10th and 16th centuries, and in the 13th century produced the Ostrov Song – among the oldest texts in Czech, and likely the oldest spiritual writing.

A thousand years of Noto Sans evolution ("Phoenician" > Imperial Aramaic > Hebrew)

Gosh, good question. So the English, Dutch and German words go back to a common *fader, in which the *d was once [ð] but by then most likely [d].

This gives us the Dutch (vader), the Old English (fæder) and the German via the High German Consonant Shift (Vater). The English sound shifts in late ME.

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

There is death and wanton violence everywhere we look, there is unimaginable loss and fear, all thanks to a handful of men at the helm who have never had to answer for a single wrong.

Thank you so much! What a lovely comment to receive!

My sympathies, and these two are examples of why it's really not just about diminutive things – it's also about casual language, and in this case about giving things (like A and B) endings that the grammar can work better with

Can Poles Understand Czech? | Easy Polish 196 YouTube video by Easy Polish

My friend, driving past the biggest Christmas tree I've ever seen: "no, to je hezkej stromeček"

No wonder the Poles think it's a cute language
youtu.be/Sk-XuU4kRzE?...

I've had it up to here with Czechs making everything diminutive, even 'it'. You'll get taught 'to je ono' for 'that is it', and I'm prepared for 'to je vono' in casual speech, but I've now heard a friend say 'to je vončo'.

Ah, you see, I'm pre-dinner here (and have forsworn beer for Lent), so my linguistic powers are at full strength

"Gistradagis" is a Gothic word, attested once, that perfectly corresponds to English 'yesterday' –⁠ except that it means 'tomorrow'.

Old Norse is flexible with this word too ('í gær' means 'yesterday/tomorrow'), perhaps due to a common stage when it came to refer to a day on either side of today.

Oh dear...

Guernésiais translations generated by AI 'could be wrong' A Guernsey native language expert shares concerns if artificial intelligence translates reliably.

I mean this is just generally good advice but...

@dannybate.bsky.social

I suppose they're in the neighbourhood of case endings. We think of case as grammatical, while these endings derive new agent/patient nouns, but there's overlap between the two camps. If they started being used across the board, far beyond a particular set of nouns, we might have cases on our hands

Mid-3rd century BC, it's an old story when classical authors like Pliny write about it

Thank you so much! I'm very grateful for this endorsement and sharing!

Book Final cover This is my own page for my book, Why Q Needs U, published in the UK in October 2025 and lauded by The Economist as one of their books of the year! It’s my debut book, and hopefull…

This book is fascinating: "Why Q Needs U," by @dannybate.bsky.social. One (of millions) of fun facts: the symbol that evolved into modern Q originally depicted a monkey, with two stacked circles and a tail. Q's tail is actually a tail. dannybate.com/book/

Cf. the ablative '-āt' / '-ād' ending in Sanskrit.

It was the ablative bit I really wanted to get to, true to character.

This bronze coin from around the time of the name change bears the word "BENVENTOD", showing the old D ending of the ablative case that's lost in later Classical Latin – that is, 'from Beneventum'.

A bronze coin from Roman-era Beneventum, with Apollo's head and the text "Benven-tod" on one side, from the Classical Numismatic Group

In ancient southern Italy, there was a settlement known as something like Malies in the local Oscan language, rendered in Greek as Malioenton.

This became Maleventum to the Romans, but that by accident sounded unlucky (like 'evil-wind'). So, it got renamed Beneventum – today, the city of Benevento.

All of them? Wow! That puts you in an exclusive group of listeners (possibly just you and me). Thank you!

I have now listened to all podcast episodes of @dannybate.bsky.social's A Language I Love Is...
What should I do with my time now? There is no joy in sun, flower or even the smile of a neighbour when I can't be accompanied by facts and stories about language, lingustics and love.
Woe is me!

Thank you!

I just finished Why Q Needs U by @dannybate.bsky.social - really interesting for language nerds! - and now I'm starting 1923 by @nedboulting.bsky.social, which is bidding fair to be just as interesting for cycling nerds!

The starring linguists were:
@jesszafarris.com, @languagewriter.bsky.social, @marcofranconeves.bsky.social and @linguisticdiscovery.com. I'll be sharing some interesting snippets (such as Jess on AI and Marco's books in Brazil and Galicia) on Instagram and YouTube, as soon as I figure out how.