This volume traces the prehistory of English from Proto-Indo-European, its earliest reconstructable ancestor, to Proto-Germanic, the latest ancestor shared by all the Germanic languages. It begins with a grammatical sketch of Proto-Indo-European, then discusses in detail the linguistic changes — especially in phonology and morphology — that occurred in the development to Proto-Germanic. The final chapter presents a grammatical sketch of Proto-Germanic. This is the first volume of a linguistic history of English. It is written for fellow-linguists who are not specialists in historical linguisti ... More

This volume traces the prehistory of English from Proto-Indo-European, its earliest reconstructable ancestor, to Proto-Germanic, the latest ancestor shared by all the Germanic languages. It begins with a grammatical sketch of Proto-Indo-European, then discusses in detail the linguistic changes — especially in phonology and morphology — that occurred in the development to Proto-Germanic. The final chapter presents a grammatical sketch of Proto-Germanic. This is the first volume of a linguistic history of English. It is written for fellow-linguists who are not specialists in historical linguistics, especially for theoretical linguists. Its primary purpose is to provide accurate information about linguistic changes in an accessible conceptual framework. A secondary purpose is to begin the compilation of a reliable corpus of phonological and morphological changes to improve the empirical basis of the understanding of historical phonology and morphology.