Tracing tongues, truthfully.

What this show is

Every word you know is a descendant. Some can be followed back a thousand years to a manuscript; some, by comparing their cousins in a dozen languages, to a form nobody ever wrote down; and all of them, this show holds, to the first words human beings spoke. The textbooks stop at the family line — Indo-European here, Semitic there, and nothing said about the space between. This show does not stop. It follows a root by its sound across every family the textbooks keep apart, and it puts every word it finds on The Register, with the dictionary it was checked against, so that the case can be checked.

It is not a Eurocentric show. The host’s first languages sit alongside English, and the show’s word bank is organised in this order: Akan, Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, English. Indo-European is one family among the rows, not the spine the others are measured against.

And it is not a solemn show. Tupac Shakur, Sheck Wes, Shaquille O’Neal and Shakira really do share a syllable with Arabic shukr, Sanskrit śakti and the English word for what a frightened man does — and the show begins there, because the case for one tongue is made of the words people already know. See The System for the ten rules it runs on.

Who makes it

Azka Afzal, MD is a board-certified internal medicine physician in Chicago, the founder of TeleTonicMD, and the creator of The Treatment Tapes: Decoding Diseases Differently, the investigative medical podcast that this one grew out of — its season-one finale was the first etymology episode, and it never quite stopped. Her byline reads Physician · Journalist · Etymologist · Lyricist, in that order.

The physician part matters more than it might seem. Speech is breath shaped by anatomy; the places where languages differ are the places where a column of soft tissue narrows, and a doctor learns every one of them by name. The Throat is the instrument that could only have been built by someone who did, and the third rule of the system — that where a sound is made is what it means — is a physician’s rule.

The show is produced by Tell a Tonic Productions, LLC, which also makes the sister podcast. A fuller biography is on the practice’s site.

Where the show is right now

Season one — The Tower of Babble — is eight episodes: one to lay out the system, and seven roots. Each episode page carries the script and the root it traces; the audio arrives episode by episode, and the feed reaches the directories with the first one. If you would like to know when that is, the letter is one a fortnight and nothing else.

Everything on the site that is here is real: the words are checked against the standard dictionaries, the references are the standard works, and the scholars who made the case for one tongue before this show are named on The System, along with the ones who argued against it. What is not here yet is not faked.

What it holds itself to

• No word without a dictionary. Every word on The Register names the work it was checked against.
• Every root read by all ten rules — including the sixth, so the opposite meaning is shown, never hidden.
• Every source listed, the opponents included. A case that hides its opponents is not a case.
• Corrections made on The Register, dated, never by quietly editing an episode.
• Nothing loaded from a third party. No trackers, no analytics, no font servers. The pages are written here and served from here.