A Language I Love Is...

ALILI is back for a second series! Here's episode 16 with Jeremy Bradley, who takes us on a journey into the Mari language. This is a linguistic tour de force, surely the episode that mentions and discusses the most languages, from Estonian to Indonesian.

Jeremy's Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/Chi_con_carnage⁠

The Mari website: ⁠https://mari-language.univie.ac.at/⁠

Host: Dr Jeremy Bradley

Guest: Danny Bate

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's episode 15 and the finale of the first series of ALILI! To mark the occasion, the tables have been turned and your usual host now finds himself on the receiving end of the format he created, as Krishnan Ram-Prasad rejoins the show to interview me about the amazing Old Irish language. We dive into what this language is, who spoke it, who wrote in it, and why it's terrifying at first but actually rather wonderful.

Books to get you started!

- Sengoidelc by David Stifter: ⁠https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1022/sengoidelc/⁠

- A Student's Companion to Old Irish grammar by Ranke de Vries: ⁠https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Se7VzQEACAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions⁠

Host: Dr Krishnan Ram-Prasad

Guest: Danny Bate

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's time for the fourteenth and penultimate episode of the first series of ALILI, in which Gioia Cacchioli joins me to talk about Tigrinya, a Semitic and syntactically striking language of eastern Africa. Gioia introduces the language, its family tree, its word-building, its use of the Ge'ez script, and how she came to love Tigrinya.

Here's Gioia's website: ⁠https://gioiacacchioli.com/⁠

The word of the episode: abugida (⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida⁠)

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Gioia Cacchioli

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here's episode 13 and it's all about Welsh! Victoria Noble, a PhD researcher in the semantics of Welsh and Arabic, joins me to share her enthusiasm and admiration for the Welsh language, discussing both its cool linguistic features and the difficult details of its history.

Note from Victoria: the annual population survey mentioned at 8:02 is from 2023, not 2003.

You can find Victoria on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/LinguisVic

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Victoria Noble

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For episode 12, I popped along to Charles University in Prague, to interview Dr Radek Šimík, a linguist, lecturer and researcher there, and to talk all about the local language: Czech. The topics ranged from the history of Czech and its dialects, to the influences of German and a special bit of syntax, which made for a great discussion.

You can find Radek's personal website here.

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Dr Radek Šimík

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 11 of ALILI sees us back beside the Baltic Sea, where Dr Francis Young guides us into the story of Lithuania and the Lithuanian language. Francis discusses both history and prehistory in detail, and joyously shares some rather wrong ideas that people have held about the origin of this Indo-European language.

To learn more from Francis, here's his ⁠website⁠ and ⁠Twitter⁠.

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Dr Francis Young

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

ALILI has made it to ten episodes, and this tenth instalment is a suitably sensational journey into the linguistic and cultural cosmos of Persian. Alexander Jabbari joins me to talk about this influential language, and demonstrate why Persian is a hugely important yet surprisingly accessible global tongue.

Alexander's ⁠website⁠ and ⁠Twitter⁠.

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Dr Alexander Jabbari

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 9 is here and it's all about Mexico! The wonderful Gilly Marchini, a PhD researcher at Edinburgh, guide us into the linguistic landscape of Mexico and its particular variety of Spanish, and into the practice of linguistic fieldwork and documentation. Gilly's passion and principles combine to make for a fun and fascinating look at Mexican Spanish.

Gilly's website can be found here: https://gillymarchini.wordpress.com/

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Gilly Marchini

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the eighth episode of A Language I Love Is..., Charles Roe joins me to introduce into the linguistic world of Latin in the Middle Ages. Charles offers a great example of how a particular language is often not defined linguistically, and demonstrates how Latin after Rome was anything but a dead language.

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Dr. Charles Roe

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 7 of ALILI... is a journey into the Uralic language family, specifically via one of its famous European members: Estonian! Prof. Johanna Laakso joins me to share her long-held love for a language very similar to her native Finnish, yet interestingly different in lots of ways, thanks to the specific ingredients that have gone into the Estonian of today.

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Prof. Johanna Laakso

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.