Today the Endless Knot podcast features my interview with hosts Aven McMaster and Mark Sundaram, mainly about my new book Reckonings and then branching out from there, among other topics, to:
- the biases and blind spots that lead folks to conclude wrongly that the Roman numerals were replaced because they were awkward for arithmetic;
- the various relationships among words for counting, thinking, talking, and cutting;
- our unexpected choices and constraints when selecting how to say and write numbers;
- the history of the comparative, historical linguistic disciplines including linguistic anthropology, classics, and philology;
- and a lot more!
For those of you who don’t know the podcast, it’s a gem that focuses on etymology, classics, English, history, and more. Strongly recommended! – ok, I grant that I may be biased when it comes to today’s episode, but there’s a ton of great other content to be found on the podcast, as well as the affiliated website and Youtube channel.
Glossographia 