A Language I Love Is... – Details, episodes & analysis

Dydh da! Episode 28 of ALILI is here, and Daniel Prohaska joins me to discuss Cornish! This Celtic language has a long and fascinating history, stretching back to Roman Britain. It's a story not only of slow decline, but also of resurrection. Daniel was the ideal expert to introduce it, being involved in modern efforts to revitalise and popularise Cornish for the twenty-first century.

Daniel's professional website: ⁠⁠https://www.ryan-prohaska.com/⁠⁠

Daniel's Cornish website: https://kernowekbew.com/

Daniel's audio Cornish course: ⁠⁠https://www.kernewegva.com/deskikernowek.html⁠⁠

Host: Dr Danny Bate

Guest: Daniel Prohaska

Audio Mixing and Mastering: Jeremiah McPadden

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

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

Time for Episode 27 and a return to the Slavic languages! Unsurprisingly, Croatian is a Slavic language widely spoken in the modern-day country of Croatia, but did you know that it has many speakers in eastern Austria too? Burgenland Croatian is the starring language of this episode, beloved and chosen by Dr Katharina Tyran. As one of its native speakers and researchers, Katharina is the ideal person to introduce the past, present and future of this minority language.

Katharina's University of Vienna page: https://slawistik.univie.ac.at/personen/person/user/tyrank65/inum/1079/backpid/12319/

Listen to Katharina podcasting in Burgenland Croatian here: https://www.hrvatskicentar.at/de/centar-podcast

Sample of spoken Burgenland Croatian from here: https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/corpus/Croate%20du%20Burgenland?lang=en&mode=pro

Host: Dr Danny Bate

Guest: Dr Katharina Tyran

Audio Mixing and Mastering: Jeremiah McPadden

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

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

The third episode of this second series is a Biblical bonanza, as Dr Benjamin Suchard comes on the show to introduce the linguistic world of Biblical Hebrew. We discuss the language's history, its family tree, its layer of loanwords and external influences, and how human this holy language can be.

Benjamin's website: ⁠https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/⁠

Benjamin's Academia page: ⁠https://kuleuven.academia.edu/BenjaminSuchard⁠

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Dr Benjamin Suchard

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

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

Episode 17 of ALILI is a linguistic and historical voyage into the Bulgarian language, as Vienna's Leonid Motz guides us through the language's many ingredients, far-reaching connections, and membership of the Balkan Sprachbund.

To hear more from Leonid:

His Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/ulaantenger⁠

His podcasting performance with Jeremy Bradley: ⁠https://www.recet.at/podcast/detail/episode-37-minority-languages-in-russia⁠

Host: Danny Bate

Guest: Leonid Motz

Music: Bossa Nova by William_King

Artwork: Willow Marler

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

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.