Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to series five of the Life of Letters, a podcast exploring the art history and future of calligraphy, handwriting and all things letter related.
I'm your host, Laura Edrilyn, a London based calligrapher with a curious mind. Continuing this journey to connect with artists, historians, experts and letter lovers all around the world.
As the podcast grows, I'm so grateful that this season is once again kindly supported by Speedball art, champions of craftsmanship and creativity, helping keep the life of letters thriving across generations.
Today, I'm speaking with Richard Manning, founder of wordsecrets.org after studying classics at Cambridge where he specialised in linguistics, Richard was a civil servant with the Department for International Development and its predecessors, taking him all over the world, giving him opportunities to learn about diverse cultures, histories and languages from across our rapidly changing world.
Now retired, Richard writes and curates a website and weekly blog to engage with others with an interest in word origins and share the secrets of the words we know so well. Richard, welcome to the Life of Letters.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Thank you very much, Laura. It's a great pleasure to join you and your community of calligraphists. And I feel, I do so with some trepidation because my handwriting has been.
Nobody likes my handwriting, to put it bluntly.
And I very much admire people who can write in a beautiful and legible way. And of course, the history of a lot of things I'm interested in depend on people having written in a. In a beautiful and legible way, preserving texts from long ago and bringing to us a lot of works of great value which would otherwise have been completely lost. So I'm very excited to be here with this community to talk about our shared interest in the English language and words.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: That's lovely. Yes, it's so true. Yeah, you're quite right. Handwriting is always a, a controversial subject for most people. Quite, quite a difficult one when we write so quickly these days. And there's, there's lots of different ways that we can write and how we write and hopefully this will explore a little bit more behind what that's given you as well.
I wanted to start just by easing us in a little bit. We haven't used the word etymology yet, but that's kind of, as I understand it, the, the sort of subject area of which you kind of explore. And I wondered if you could tell us what exactly is etymology?
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Well, like a lot of, a lot of words that English has borrowed and English is a somewhat say English is a sort of magpie language, we've great borrowers of other people's words and One of the features is that we borrow an awful lot of our technical. Comes from ancient Greek. And etymology is a classic example of this. All the other logi words, the logi bit is basically the Greek word for word, and the etymo bit is a much rarer Greek word, but its basic core meaning is about truth.
So the literal meaning is the truth of a word. But what it, what it really means in practice is it's, it's a focus on why words are what they are. I know that you had a wonderful talk from George Gatsis in an earlier podcast, and he brought my attention to a dialogue by the philosopher Plato in which Socrates has a discussion entirely about word origins. And it's a very unsatisfactory dialogue because it's all an attempt to say, well, words are the way they are because they're representing something very directly. And I think that works fine for words like cuckoo, which is obviously based on the sound the cuckoo makes. But when you try and put it more widely, it falls to bits. So understanding why words are what they are and how they relate to each other is in, in my opinion, very fascinating. And if you learn a little bit about how it works, it becomes more fascinating. And that's really what I'm, I'm on about.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Amazing. Amazing. It is fascinating. I mean, I mean, the, the bits that I've kind of scraped together from either conversations or just exploring your work and the, the website that you've got, it is the most glorious sort of rabbit hole of information.
I wanted to kind of wheel back time a little bit and ask you, where did your kind of journey into languages and linguistic patterns first begin?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Well, I suppose it began with my mother. I mean, it's true for most of us that were very affected by our parents.
My mother was one of, I think, many people around in all generations who've been interested in, you know, why is this word like this and how does it relate to something else? She was a bit of a stickler for doing it right. I mean, if anybody said arctic instead of arctic, they would be picked up immediately. But she was just interested in how words were. One thing that stuck with me is that she and my father went on a holiday to the Netherlands before the Second World War, before any of any of us were born.
And one thing she picked up there was a little rhyme which goes as follows. Butter, bread and green cheese is good English and good frieze. Frieze, meaning the dialect of Friesland in, in the Netherlands.
And that turns out to be a very important Little observation, because the Anglo Saxons came, broadly speaking, from that area.
And Old English, along with the Frisian dialect, were unique in changing the hard C at the beginning of the word cheese into a ch sound. So if you go to any other German language, whether it's Dutch itself or German or the Nordic languages, their word for cheese will begin with a hard K sound.
But English and frieze, the Frisian dialect, have a ch sound. Now, I think I'm right in saying, Laura, that you know Chiswick pretty well do. And what does that mean? It means cheese village.
And. But you'll also probably know that there's an important town in the Lake District called Keswick and that also means cheese village.
And the reason that one is Chiswick and the other is Keswick is that Chiswick is the classic English change from K to ch.
And in the north, thanks to the Vikings and bringing the Scandinavian pronunciation, cheese stayed with a. With a hard K sound. So Kazik and Chiswick are a classic case where you suddenly see something because there's a very common change across English which makes it different from its other Germanic languages.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: That's amazing. And that's. That's exactly the sort of thing that I find so fascinating, is where we can see these letters, they can look very similar, but when we say them. And obviously accents and dialects can change them massively. And that, I guess that sort of evolution of how we pronounce words is influenced by lots of different cultures over the years and what's been brought over from other countries, but also, I presume, environments as well. I don't. I mean, I'm sort of starting to guess here you should probably take over.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Well, I should. Just to finish my little journey.
I. I was taught Greek at. At my grammar school by a very interesting man who came from Sunderland.
And I think because he came from Sunderland, he had a.
A real affinity for Danish. And one of the first things that happened to English was that the Vikings were extremely important. And even they brought us words, of course, like ransack and troll, as you might imagine. But they also brought us words amazingly like their T, H, E, I, R and this. So there's an extraordinarily deep amount of Norse in English. And one of the things that you may remember from my website is that any word any of you use that begins with sk, the sk sound like sky or anything like that cannot be inherited English word, because all those have, in English, rather like the cheese word, they've all become sh words. So a shirt is proper English, whereas a Skirt has to be borrowed from Old Norse.
It's the same, it's the same word. It means something short basically. But that was a great insight. So when I went to Cambridge and read Latin and Greek, they gave you a chance of specializing in linguistics in the last year. And that's why I took that course. And that's why I emerged from three years knowing a little bit about the history of Indo European. I don't know how much people know about this, but basically when really the people who were trained in Latin and Greek went to India in the late 18th century that they discovered that the languages of northern India descended from Sanskrit were incredibly like Greek and Latin in certain respects.
And that that's really transformed the whole area of linguistics by making people realize there was a huge group of languages which were all related to a single source. Languages which now of course are some of the most important languages in the world, like Spanish or Hindi as well as English. That's another fascination about the whole thing.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: Goodness. My goodness. And so when you've, after you studied the linguistics part at Cambridge, did you continue to learn, how did you sort of apply all this sort of interest?
[00:09:51] Speaker B: Well, it was, I thought to myself, you know, as one does, you know, what do you do with a degree in classics? Do you end up teaching Latin or what do you do? And one option would be to do research. And I came to the conclusion that all the interesting work on Indo European, which, which fascinated me a lot, had all been done by lots of extremely high quality, mainly German scholars in the 19th century. So there wasn't much more to do. So I decided that research on language history was not worthwhile. I suppose I could have turned myself into a modern day computer translation kind of person and done something like that, but I wasn't really into that. So I just went the other way and joined the civil service and happened to coincide with the setting up of a thing called the Ministry of Overseas Development. And I thought, well, that sounds rather interesting. And spent my, spent most of my life working in this very interesting interface between the richer and the poorer parts of the world, which, as you said in your introduction, does open your eyes to the extraordinary way in which cultures develop and of course the fundamentals of language and all those. And of course in a whole generation where English is becoming increasingly a kind of vehicle between cultures of all sorts in a way which is, which is quite extraordinary if you go back even 100 years.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh my gosh. My brain is firing lots of different questions, but I will stay on track.
How can we kind of understand where these words have, have maybe come from if we go back further than where we've got sort of written texts?
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Yes, that's a really good question. Of course. First of all, we have some advantages in a number of Indo European languages because we do have very ancient texts. The oldest ones we have are some references, some words really, in what is something very close to Sanskrit, which are recorded in Syria in about 1400 BC. We have the tablets from Knossos and elsewhere written in linear B. Greek, which is slightly old, sort of 1500 BC. And we have cuneiform that's. You'll be familiar, I'm sure, as calligraphists, with scratching into clay in Hittite, which go back a little bit further. But it's clear that Greek, Sanskrit and Hittite at that period were very different languages. Nobody could have understood each other at all at that stage. So if you go back to the common origin, you have to go back a lot further and you can do this. This is the, really, the brilliant part of linguistics is that what was discovered in the 19th century was that the change of sounds is very regular.
So as I was saying with my cheese example, every single hard K sound that Old English had inherited, if it was before an I or an e, it would infallibly change to ch. That's why you get the word cold. But you also have the word chill. So cold is before an o. So it keeps the hard sound and chill because it becomes before an I has the soft sound of ch.
And that's very regular and reliable. As a result, you can build backwards from words, you know, even in languages which have been recorded only recently, no Germanic language has been written, was written down till almost the turn of the, of the zero millennium. And yet there's a lot of very interesting stuff that the Germanic languages can show about a language which probably was a single language about 6,000 years ago, probably somewhere in Ukraine or South Russia. It's really amazing. But that's, that's the truth of the matter.
And this is what gives the, this is what gives one the ability to look much further back into history than you might think. Now, it's not the case that you or I could have turned up in Ukraine in 6000 BC based on, with a handbook that we've got today and make ourselves understood, because we don't know exactly what any sound was like.
We have an extraordinarily good idea of what that language looked like and what the basics of it were. And that's pretty extraordinary, really.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: It's Fascinating, isn't it? And being able to understand how languages work, I presume with linguistics, have you had to have a bit of an understanding about a lot of different languages? Have you collected languages as you've gone?
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Well, I think it's very fascinating to see how the languages work. I picked up a tiny bit of Yoruba when I was in Lagos. And that language has a lot of regularity in it. A little bit like the assumed Indo European. There's a certain structure to the way words are created, which is very kind of rely on.
And when I was in Southeast Asia, I learned what they call taxi Thai. In other words, I could more or less tell a taxi whether it was going right or to go right or left. That kind of very basic. But the languages like Thai and Chinese are so different.
Very monosyllabic, which is not unlike Indo European in some ways, but of course very tonal, so that the up and down of your voice becomes absolutely crucial.
Again, that was quite, that was quite important in early Indo European, whereas it's not important at all in English.
So the different ways in which people make the distinctions that give you meaning does vary across time and across geographies. And I think that's very important to always have in mind.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
You've kind of made me think about my husband who's British born Filipino, but he's, he's grown up with Filipino parents. And my limited understanding of it is that there are just so many different dialects over there. So they've got a kind of universal language of Tagalog. But then there are all these other dialects that can be actually hugely different. Like the words are said very, very differently. And I think that's fascinating to be in a part of the world which is so close and yet have such different languages and how words are created. It must just be fascinating to dive into these sorts of things.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: I think so in the Philippines, in my view, is a very interesting example because you've got both in Tagalog. You've got a kind of locally derived common language linking lots of individual languages and dialects which probably can't be understood, mutually understood. And then on top of that you've got first Spanish and then English imposed, which have given Filipinos in some ways a bit of an advantage because they're very internationally mobile. But also it runs the risk that a lot of languages are lost. And this course is going on all the time. How you, how you keep languages going in. In this. In a situation where the easy thing is to.
Is to learn English Essentially, I mean, if you look at, for example, how Welsh has survived and Cornish hasn't quite, you know, always been possibly brought back from the dead. A lot of, of language is about prestige and it, it was. There are remarkably few borrowings from Welsh in English because Welsh was not a prestige language for the Anglo Saxons, whereas English is absolutely full of French and Latin words because Anglo Norman was. Norman language was absolutely crucial for the English for several hundred years.
So you always borrow very heavily from the languages that have prestige. And at the moment in many parts of the world, it's English that has the prestige and that has very big implications for many other languages around the world.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: If you're enjoying this episode and fancy supporting the podcast, you can literally buy us a coffee. Head to the link in the show notes. It's a lovely way to help keep the life of letters going. Thank you. Now let's get back to the episode.
Do you think.
I hope I can word this question right. The pressure of talking about words and making sure I word it right.
Do you think that the English language is so popular because it's borrowed so many words from elsewhere?
Or is that, is it the other way around, like you were just saying, that kind of English became and has become this more, maybe not universal, but a kind of more common used language, even if it's got American English and you know, different tweaks and turns or. Yeah. Or is it just because there's so many people using it now and learning it.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: I think you've got a good point that the fact that English has itself borrowed so many words from other cultures, particularly European cultures, and particularly Latin and French on the one hand, and Greek along with many other languages of similarly used Latin and Greek for technical things. I think that certainly helps.
I remember reading a long time ago a book about Switzerland, I think, and it said this goes back to the late 19th century and the Englishman will arrive and jingling his sovereigns in his pocket. And that means that the Swiss will learn English because they, they wish, wish to act as guides to these alpinists and so on. And it's a bit like that. I mean, if I think you cannot underestimate the importance of, of the United States here, as the United States has been over a long period the kind of richest country in the world, that means that all sorts of people find it extremely advantageous to be able to communicate with Americans. And that's been a crucial factor, I think, in the way English has spread in a way that French wasn't able to, despite a lot of, you know, French government attempts to sustain French as, as, as lingua franca, which is, after all means French. So English has kind of become the Esperanto, the, the practical Esperanto of the world, I think. And it will be a long time before that changes. English itself will change.
But I think an English based international common language, rather like Bahas or Indonesia, these kind of languages will survive for a long time. Of course, the thing that goes well the other way is that for reasons that are well understood, the English Alphabet is extremely hard to follow because you cannot say in the way you can with say Italian or German, that because it's written this way, it's pronounced, it's pronounced in some unambiguous way. We all know that's not the case.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: You've, you've literally segued into something I wanted to ask you because I think one of the most common gripes that I hear quite a lot and my children have sort of between primary and secondary schools. So there is a lot of. But why is it like that and why do we say this and why is it, you know, it was this and now it's that there are patterns in the English language, of course, but then there's always these sort of random anomalies and you think, oh yeah, can't really explain that. One of the most sort of common ones, I think, is this I before E except after C things.
And I just wondered whether you could expand on that a little bit or any insights that you have.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: Well, I mean, the fact of the matter is that the English spelling was entirely logical when it was first set out.
This is the case with almost all languages. When you first write them down, you write something which is very close to the way the language was spoken at the time. This is particularly true of, I mean, obviously there are different ways of writing, but if you have alphabets, broadly speaking, all alphabets link to what are the sounds that make the difference in meaning in a language.
And it's usually, you know, between 26 and 30 or 40. I mean, Alphabet's a very efficient way of writing things down. But of course, what language never stays still? So there's always this tension between the slow moving orthography and the relatively quick moving way in which words are pronounced. Even in my own lifetime, we've gone from pronouncing economics to economics. And that's only a minor thing, you know, so things are changing all the time. And in English it so happened that huge changes were taking place just after the, just at the time really the Printing came. Came along. And printing was, of course, absolutely fundamental because once you've got the typeset up, you're not going to start fiddling around with that, if you can possibly help it. So that gave great stability to the written language and the. Because of a thing called the Great Vowel Shift, which I'm sure you heard of, but it's terribly untaught. I had a nephew who studied English at university and he'd never heard of the Great Vowel Shift. It's unbelievable, really.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: So can you explain it? Yeah.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Yes. I mean, in a word, in, in the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries, if you go back to, say, 1400, English was. Was pronounced very much as it's written.
So if you had a word like gone, it would be spelled, it would be pronounced gun.
And all these, all these sounds would have been. Would have been done. You just have to sit and read it so that, that the.
The word knight, spelled K, N, I, G, H, T would be pronounced knicht, like, rather like German. So. So all these things are historically accurate, but then they've all changed. So we have a lot of redundant letters and all the rest of it. And let me just give a shout out at this point to a book which I think is absolutely brilliant and has just come out and it has the lovely title YQ needs you. And it's written by a chap called Danny Bateman. It was published late last year and instead of having chapters 1 to 26, it has chapters A to Z.
I've just got to chapter K.
And I thoroughly recommend it as a really good, entertaining read, which tells you an awful lot about some of. Some things you and I have been talking about. And it's very accessible. It's exactly the kind of easy to read, really well researched little book that anybody can enjoy. And I think it's a thoroughly good piece of work.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Amazing.
So the Great Vowel Shift, is that actually sort of a moment in time where you could, you can trace it in history? Like this actually happens at this point?
[00:24:21] Speaker B: You can. And like all these things, these things are very seldom.
They can't happen overnight. People start speaking differently. I mean, we're all familiar with this both in, in our own daily lives. I mean, it's like that. And of course, we still have big, important vowel changes between, you know, northern and Southern English.
Is it Newcastle or is it Newcastle? And so all those things are still with us. But in the case of the Great Vowel Shift, you just, you know, there is, there is, there are many explanations available online as to what happened. It would have taken 150 years, probably, and it would have been different in different parts of the country. You know, everything spreads around. You get, you know, like Essex English now, as it were. Things gradually spread around the place and in the end it settled down in about 1730 to something which is much closer to the way we speak. But as we all know, if you just listen to a recording of the late Queen in the night from the 1950s, it doesn't sound like the way you're talking today.
[00:25:24] Speaker A: Yeah. So this.
[00:25:25] Speaker B: This goes on inevitably. So the written language, people try quite hard in the early 20th century, people like Bernard Shaw, to say there must be a much better way of writing English and it should be written the.
You do it now. So in that case, it's not quite as simple as all that, because let's say that. Let's go back to another. These KN words like knee, if you wrote knee, N I, it looks very odd, doesn't it? And words get muddled up. So in a way, the spelling sometimes keeps a distinction, which is actually quite important.
It's not. It's not as straightforward. And in practice, of course, all these attempts of the early 20th century to completely rewrite the. The way English was written have basically failed. There are some other languages where language reforms have been quite successful. I mean, Turkish would be a very extreme example, I think. It's very difficult to change. So we have to live, I think, in a world where the written language and what you and I say on a daily basis is always going to be slightly different. But from my point of view, this is very good, because, after all, it means that actually we're not trying to get from the 21st century back to 6000 B.C. with English, we're trying to get from about the 14th century.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: The language that you and I actually read is much older than the language you and I speak.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Gosh, it's fascinating. And you've got. You've created a fantastic website and blog for people to access more around this subject. It's called wordsecrets.org and we will pop a link to the show. Show notes as well. I wanted to get your thoughts on how. Kind of just expanding on what you were just saying, how. How language has evolved, but how the digital age is sort of impacting the future of words. What do you think about kind of where we're going?
[00:27:16] Speaker B: I think in a way it's not. It's not going to be a new process, but it's. It is an accelerating, Accelerated process. I think that's The. That's the big change, I think, so that whereas in the past, I mean, after all, languages in a. You know, if you go back to the Indo Europeans here you had a single speech community somewhere in Russia or Ukraine, and you end up a thousand or two thousand years later with at least a dozen different languages which are mutually unintelligible.
So if you separate people, their accents will change first of all, and then the languages will change, and eventually they become completely different languages.
On the other hand, if you have a very interconnected world, the opposite thing is taking place. There's a centrifugal rather than a centripetal approach in which words move very rapidly across a particular space.
And that's what English experienced after 1066. You know, we were in a linguistic community really, with the Normans. And a huge number of French and Latin words spread into English over a period of two or 300 years and completely transformed what had been a very Germanic language into something that looked very kind of French.
Now what's happening now is that this is happening on a planetary scale for the first time in history. I mean, it probably began with trading voyages in the 17th and 18th century, but it's now happening in an extra. At a completely extraordinary speed. I mean, a word can be taken up across the entire world in a matter of minutes, really. And we can probably all think of. Of words that are our flavor of the month, which none of us knew about 20 years ago, but are now going to be common across people who access the Internet anywhere, which is basically everybody.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: So I think that the digital age is going to accelerate the commonalities because people are communicating with each other, often in this kind of quasi English across the world. You know, whether they're researchers or spammers, I mean, all sorts of languages there. There to be used by anybody. Yeah, I think. I think what we're seeing is a rapid acceleration in this, and it will. It will mean that instead of languages diverging. So even in the early 20th century, when cars came in, you had, you know, American hoods and. And English bonnets and all that sort of stuff and sidewalks and pavements and all these things that we know very well.
But you don't really see that if you look at technology, technology now, we all use the same vocabulary. You know, even the French are into bytes and so on, because that's the way the world's been set up. And because companies are much more globalized than governments. If you've got large companies driving a lot of what's going on as with Google and so on, then these things will be very quickly transmitted across the world. So I think we were seeing a radical speeding up of.
Of the planetary approach to language, which has never been actually seen before.
[00:30:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Wow, that's. Yeah, that's sort of scary and hopeful at the same time.
[00:30:32] Speaker B: Absolutely. I think I pretty much support the way in which there have been real attempts to try and safeguard things like Manx and Cornish and the rest of it. I mean, the fact you can now get, as you always get in Ireland, you get these road signs in Irish as well as English, and you're increasingly seeing things like that in Brittany, in Wales and so on. I think we have to work very hard to try and secure the future of languages, keep the diversity of languages, but at the same time, I think we have to accept that English in particular is now the kind of international trade language and will be a dominant feature in how all languages evolve over the next 100 years.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Amazing. Gosh, what a. What a whirlwind. What a wonderful conversation. We sort of finish our episodes with perhaps a challenging question, perhaps not. But I wanted to throw two at you, which I haven't prepared you for at all. But the first one is your favorite letter of the Alphabet and why, and the second one, if you have a moment to think of it, is your favourite word and why. So start where you want to, but letter and word.
[00:31:43] Speaker B: Well, the letter. I've been Very conveniently. This book by Danny Bate came along at the right moment and the other day I was reading the chapter on H, and I've decided that of the ones I've read so far, I think H is a particularly nice one, because in some situations H may mean nothing at all. I mean, we drop our H's. It's a very common part of many English dialects. It can be a consonant, as it is in English, but in Greek it's actually a vowel. And in Russian, because after all, Russian is written with a script that the Greeks devised, it's also a key vowel.
And at the same time, and this is a point that Danny makes rather well, it's used as a modifier. So if you put an H after a T, T, you change the T to a th, and similarly, after a P you change to f. And that goes back, as he explains, to the way in which the words like letters, like t and. And the way in which Greek worked at the time that they had both an ordinary T, but they also had T with a with a breathing on it. So that was not so The Romans, the Greeks had a letter for that, which is called theta. The Romans didn't have a theta, so they just put an H after a t, because after all, that's what the sound was, like a t.
And then it then gradually morphed in Greek into a th sound. And as it happened, English had inherited a th sound. And so it's. It's become our way of doing that. And also, wh is a brilliant example of English language history because although probably you, like me, would now pronounce a wh word like when, as if it was just an ordinary W. If you. If you were Scottish and certainly a few hundred years ago, saying when with a breathing on it. And that breathing is shows you. And in fact, in Old English, the thing was written hw rather than wh.
So the first word of Beowulf is what?
And that two H is the. Is the remnant of a very interesting set of consonants in Indo European called labio velas, which means lip sounds with a double. Double articulation. Also at the back of your velar is the back of your soft palate. So it's like if you go to West Africa, you'll find the very important set of people in Nigeria called the Igbo.
And that's normally spelled I, G, B, O, but it's not Igbo, it's Igbo.
And that's a set of a set of consonants we haven't come to yet in these blogs, which have explained an extraordinary number of odd things in English. Now, why is it that if you have your eyes tested, you can you go to an optician with a P, but you have binoculars with a K?
Why can you have penta for five, as in pentagon or pentatonic, but you have quinquennial and all these words with Q's. So it's because in the Pentagon, quinquennial case, Greek and Latin specialized in different ways of changing this thing. And one that really appeals to me that, you know the city of Pompeii that comes. That's actually the Oscan. Oscan was a dialect of one of the Italian languages which lost out to Latin. They went to.
So whereas if you were the fifth son, in Rome, you were called Quintus, if you were the fifth son, in the Oscan areas like Pompeii, you'll be called Pompey.
And so it's just these are really. They explain a lot of very peculiar things in English which you'll enjoy.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: What's my favourite word? That's a Very tough one. I think that in a way I probably come back to these, what I've just said, actually. I think these remnants, little remnants of things that were there in the past and are still argued about. I mean, when I was at college they taught us that if, you know, there's.
We've borrowed from Greek the word thermos for a bottle that keeps things hot.
That th extraordinarily is linked to garam in Garam masala, which also is the Hindi for hot. And I was taught that the English equivalent, this is a long time ago was warm. But now most people think it wasn't warm at all, it was burn. So I'm going to opt for burn because this is something, this will remind me that there's this extraordinary sound in Indo European which has produced all these very different looking words which are all closely related.
And that also shows that people have definitely got. Got it wrong once. I'm not sure whether it should really be warm or whether it really should be burned, but they can't both be right. And so it's a good reminder to be a bit humble about the whole thing as well.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: I love that. I love that we're always learning and yeah, just question everything and be curious and keep exploring. I love that idea that there are all these words connected. We can look for patterns and look for patterns and perhaps there are also places where patterns aren't quite there and we've got to fill the gaps, gaps in somehow. That's been a fascinating conversation and thank you so much for answering all my questions, even the ones that I hadn't prepared you for at all. To find out more about Richard, people can Visit your website wordsecrets.org and they can get in touch with you if they've got any other other questions through through the website. But as always, we'll put the link and details in today's show notes. Is there anything else you wanted to add before we say goodbye?
[00:37:36] Speaker B: Just, just to say that if you do go to the website, you're very welcome to subscribe. It comes with no obligations whatsoever, but it does mean you'll get a weekly blog post from me for the next three months. So make the most of it.
[00:37:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, get on the journey. Start, start finding out. We've had a sneak peek in today's episode. So yes, sign up to the, to the blogs for sure. Richard, thank you so much for joining me today and sort of being a part of the life of letters, but also researching so much about it and being fascinated about it that you can then talk and write about it for us all to understand.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: It's a great pleasure and it's wonderful to engage with the community who really care about how to write. I think that's a very wonderful thing to do and I wish you all the best with it.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Richard.
Thanks for listening. Series 5 is made possible by my wonderful producer Heidi Cullip and the support and Speedball Art, whose commitment to high quality tools and creative tradition continues to serve, partner and deliver to artists all over the world.
If you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review or share it with a fellow letter lover. And until next time, keep listening, keep creating, and keep celebrating the life of letters.
