David Crystal

What do you think are the most lethal?

I took the term linguicide from how linguists defined it.

in the 80s.

And for them, linguicide was both overt and covert.

But you then had some years later, it wasn't that long ago.

It was definitely in the 2020s.

You had linguists.

see or perceive that these languages were being used once more as weapons of nationalism.

That's right.

That's one of the big problems is that English is, you know, as David Crystal once described it, a linguistic vacuum cleaner.

So it sucks up words from all over the place.

And, of course, they come in with their different spellings.

That gives us a window into how his puns would have landed in the ears of an Elizabethan audience.

David Crystal, the linguist who launched the original pronunciation movement, made a bold attempt to bring those sounds back on stage.

He based his reconstruction on evidence from printed texts and early phonetic accounts, arguing that words like love were still pronounced with an open vowel, like loovuhsah.

The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation, published in twenty twenty-four, codifies hundreds of such pronunciations for modern performers.