Donald A. Ringe (1)

This is the second (and this far last) volume in Ringe's series "A Linguistic History of English", covering the development from Proto-Germanic to the "classical" Old English of circa AD 900.

Like in the first volume, some of the arguments pass above my head. They're concentrated in the chapter on syntax (which is the part of the book Taylor wrote), which begins with a statement to the effect that the theoretical superstructure has been kept to a minimum, and then commences a barrage of show more generative grammar terminology that at times seems deliberately opaque. In particular, there's is much use of abbreviations like "D" and "TP" where traditional grammar would have used latinisms that at least vaguely hint at what they mean. The sections on phonology and morphology (written by Ringe) are much easier to make sense of and not coincidentally use more traditional terminology.

Something that I found interesting is that a lot of the words Ringe describes as unique to West Germanic are found in modern Swedish (North Germanic). It's possible Ringe is wrong at times, but in most cases they must be well-integrated loans from (Low) German - indeed the shape of a word like fuktig "moist" guarantees this must be the case. show less

A description of Proto-Indo-European (in a rather conservative version - Ringe reconstructs a phoneme /a/ for example), followed by an overview of the changes leading to Proto-Germanic, and finally a description of the latter language to match the first part. Since succeeding volumes (vol. 2, The Development of Old English, was published in 2014) are meant to carry the story forwards to Modern English, there's a bit of a focus on developments that proved important for that particular show more branch.

Ringe presumes more formal linguistics background than I have, but I mostly found myself able to follow his arguments, with occasional forays online to find explanations of unfamiliar concepts. It's probably about as readable as a technical work on the subject can be. show less