Dr. Steven (Steve) Novella

speaker

1,490 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 27 Jun

Dr. Steven (Steve) Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #827 - May 15 2021 podcast

For example, Tolkien, as you know, really fleshed out the languages that he used. matched

And Navi from Avatar was written as a complete and functioning language. matched

Yeah. matched

Yeah, but it's a couple hundred. matched

Yeah, it's like two, three hundred. matched

Right? matched

It's interesting. matched

There have been a lot of proposed languages, like over a thousand proposed artificial languages, but most of them were never fully developed. matched

They died on the vine. matched

Mm-hmm. matched

And most of the languages created to become an international language or whatever all failed. matched

They just never really get traction. matched

Esperanto was probably the one that got the most traction, but never really took off as a truly international language, which is how they were intended. matched

All right, so that means that nearly 30% of English words are of French origin is science, which is, I was surprised at that one. matched

So Jay, it's interesting that you say, Jay, that you thought that they were mostly Germanic because English is considered a Germanic language. matched

And so, but there's a difference here. matched

So some linguists defending the designation of English as a Germanic language say, matched

argue that most of the core vocabulary is Germanic and a lot of the technical added words later were French. matched

Technical? matched

Yeah, so like all of our words that deal with ballet, for example, are French. matched

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