In this episode, I interview Lynne Murphy, author of The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between British and American English.

Is ‘American English’ a unique language or a dialect of its parent language, British English? This episode explores the culturally constructed differences between dialects and languages.

Today, the words frank, franchise, and Franklin have nothing to do with the country of France, yet these words all derive from the name of a single Germanic tribe called the Franks.

Turkeys are native to North America, yet these birds are mistakenly named after the country of Turkey which is on the other side of the world.

The city of Cincinnati derives from the Ancient Roman Cincinnatus, a figure whom revolutionary Americans viewed as a paragon of American ideals.

There are more etymologically different names for Germany than there are for any other European country. This is due to a long history of disunity among Gemanic tribes and the geographical location of the Germanic homeland smack dab in the middle of Europe.

While the Welsh name for Wales is Cymru, the English word for the country derives from a root word that in other Germanic languages is associated with Romance language speakers. Why?

This overview explores some of the historical and etymological trends that often impact place names, such as colonialism and the commemoration of important individuals.

Today, gyms are where we go for exercise, but in Ancient Greece, the gymnasion was also a place for philosophical study and debate.

In the court system of Ancient Athens, the kategoria was a formal accusation. However, our modern sense of ‘category’ is derived from Aristotle’s use of kategoria in his philosophical writings.

In Plato’s Apology, Plato doesn’t apologize for anything––at least not in the modern sense of the word. In Ancient Greece, an apologia was a self-defensive manner of speech.

Today, sophistication is a desirable characteristic, yet the word itself derives from ‘sophistry,’ an Ancient Greek intellectual movement with a historically bad reputation.

In the ancient world, philosophy referred to all forms of intellectual knowledge. Today, the discipline of philosophy is just one aspect of the traditional field of philosophia, or ‘love of knowledge.’

This episode covers the entire history of the pronoun ‘they,’ from its roots as a Proto-Germanic demonstrative adjective to its modern usage as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun in English.

Subjectification is a unique linguistic process by which a word evolves to reflect the subjective viewpoint of the speaker using it, as seen in the evolution of words such as ‘very,’ ‘literally,’ and ‘really.’

The word ‘the’ is the only definite article in Modern English, but Old English had a whopping 20 different definite articles. How did they all consolidate into a single word?

In this conversation, Steve and I discuss the linguistic influence of the King James Bible and some common English idioms that have Biblical etymologies.

Adverbs containing the -ly suffix are contractions hiding in plain sight. -ly is cognate with the word ‘like,’ and indeed, it literally means … ‘like.’ ‘Sadly’ is sad-like. ‘Madly’ is mad-like.

‘To be’ is the most irregular verb in English. An examination of the linguistic and political history surrounding the transition from Old English to Middle English reveals why.

Take a brief tour through the historical evolution of English grammar from its Germanic roots to the present.