The Endless Knot
We discuss etymology, history, literature, science, and language, and the connections between them.
© Martin Szillat
We spoke to Dr. Valerie Fridland about her new book, “Like, Literally, Dude!” and talked about the fascinating role that many ‘errors’ in English speech actually play in communication. We discuss the never-ending changes that English has gone through, the surprisingly sophisticated rules behind our use of ‘um’ and ‘uh’, and much more.
Dr. Valerie Fridland’s website
This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
It’s Part 2 of our mega-episode on spelling! This time, we get into some of the notorious mismatches between English spelling and modern English pronunciation. Explaining them takes us all the way back to Phoenician — several times — but maybe, just maybe, some bits of this odd language will make more sense to you when we’re done!
Christopher Upward & George Davidson, The History of English Spelling (2001)
David Sacks, Letter Perfect (2003)
Kevin Stroud, The History of the Alphabet (audiobook)
NativLang “Thoth’s Pill - an Animated History of Writing”
This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License