A History of the English Language - A Companion Site

Chapter 3: Before Old English

This chapter discusses the ancestors of English. Section 1 examines the origins of humans and when they first might have acquired language, probably 50,000 or more years ago. The section also considers how people and languages spread. Section 2 examines the earliest writings, from about 5,000 years ago. Changes can be observed between these writings and later ones. Some observations regarding these changes led to the formulation of linguistic laws in the 19th century, as discussed in section 3. Section 4 shows that Old English inherits its synthetic character from older languages; section 5 reviews a number of methods for reconstructing an earlier stage of a language when we have no access to written material; and section 6 addresses some broader questions.

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Useful Links

Proto-Indo-European

The American Heritage Dictionary gives a list of IE roots.

Early Humans

Dr. Donald Johanson has published an article discussing the geographic origin point of modern humans.

Trace your own origins with the National Geographic's Genographic Project.

The archaeological journal Antiquity describes a Neanderthal tomb dig.

World Languages

The University of Hawaii hosts this exhaustive list of world languages, based on work by Meritt Ruhlen.

Oxford offers this map of languages in Eurasia, however, this map makes the error of showing Basque as Indo-European!

Writing Systems

Omniglot and Ancient Scripts both provide a wealth of information on modern and ancient writing systems from around the world.

The Comparative Method

The University of Texas and Bucknell both provide pages on the comparative method and how it is applied to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European.

Sir William Jones was one of the first linguists to recognize a connection between the languages of India and those of Europe -- from which comes the Indo-European language family. A copy of his discourse on the subject is hosted at the University of Hawaii.

Mark Rosenfelder has compiled a list of the numbers from one to ten in over 5000 languages; this is useful for seeing similarities between languages.

Spread of the Second Consonant Shift

A map of the shift is available at the Dutch department of the University of Vienna.

Wikipedia also has a page describing the shift.