We’re wading into the messy world of English spelling in this episode — the first of two, since we couldn’t fit all of the ‘quirks’ of the language into one episode. The history of orthography in English is all tangled up with the history of the alphabet, so in this part we trace some of the twists and turns that resulted in our modern script.
The ABC Cocktail
Our video on “Spelling”
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”
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Episode 122: Says Who, with Anne Curzan
Episode 121: The Vesuvius Challenge, with Stephen Parsons
Episode 120: Swimming in History, with Karen Carr
Episode 119: An Ecological Chain
Episode 118: A Crisis of Masculinity, with Melanie Racette-Campbell
Episode 117: A Brief History of Misogyny
Episode 116: A Quiverful of Time Arrows
Episode 115: Like, Literally, Dude! with Valerie Fridland
Episode 114a: The XYZ’s of Spelling
Bonus: Livestream Q&A from LingFest23
Announcement: LingFest23 Q&A Livestream
Episode 113: Ovid's Metamorphoses in the 21st Century
Episode 112: The Bellini, Art, and Patronage
Episode 111: Haggard Hawks, back again!
Episode 110: Music and Language
Episode 109: Endangered Alphabets, with Tim Brookes
Episode 108: Widows, Indian Independence, and Partition
Episode 107: Polar Regions, Comics, and Classics, with Natalie Swain
Episode 106: Future in the Past?
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