This book is volume II of A Linguistic History of English, which began the history in volume I with Proto-Indo-European and carried it through the Proto-Germanic period (Ringe Reference Ringe2006). Volume II picks up in the Northwest branch of the Germanic languages, where volume I left off, and chronicles the development of its phonological and morphosyntactic systems into the Old English period. In this second volume, Ringe authored the chapters on phonology and inflectional morphology, while the chapter on Old English syntax was written by Ann Taylor. Derivational morphology and the Old English lexicon are slated to be addressed in the third volume of this series.

The format of The Development of Old English will be familiar to those who have used historical grammars. However, in this volume, dedicated specifically to the developmental stages from Northwest Germanic to Old English itself, the traditionally described structures and innovations are allotted more space and are discussed in more detail. In the chapters on phonology and morphology, Ringe discusses changes in the grammatical systems in light of their relationships to other changes, both chronologically and in terms of their ability to feed or bleed each other. Ringe and Taylor draw evidence from grammatical handbooks and other traditional scholarship; they also make significant use of analyses from recent scholarly publications, especially those that are most compelling or have been particularly influential in the development of thought on a given structure or innovation. They highlight the relative merits of these analyses and argue for the most likely development of each change. This even-handed approach provides a starting point for the reader desirous of more information to investigate the existing literature on a topic. However, the scholar who simply wants a well-informed overview of a structure or innovation will also find it here.

The authors explain their objective in their Introduction (p.2):

This volume will therefore best serve scholars of historical linguistics who are already conversant with the method of presentation and the level of detail found in traditional historical grammars.

While the book is organized in the tradition of linguistic grammars of Indo-European languages, the perspective is markedly updated. The authors' objective as described in the volume's Introduction was not to explicate the history of the forms that a learner of Old English would encounter (as some grammars do), but rather to make sense of the historical development of the language itself. In this vein, the authors' underlying assumption is that each stage of the language was a living system of variants, spoken and perceived by real people. Where this implicit assumption becomes most visible is in the authors' attempt to understand how particular innovations may have resulted from native learners' perceptions of existing variation in the previous stage of the language. While such attempts do not constitute a large portion of the discussions of individual changes, they are significant to both the approach the authors take in presenting the material and to their particular analyses.

The volume's first chapter begins with a brief introduction followed by a seven-page overview of the sound and inflectional systems of the Old English language as well as of its dialects and early documents. The focus of this chapter and of all other descriptions of Old English forms is the West Saxon dialect, though forms in other dialects are regularly presented for purposes of comparison. The next four chapters describe the early linguistic history of Old English, beginning in chapter 2 with those innovations that shaped the development of Germanic's Northwest branch. The chronology continues through the development and ultimate diversification of Proto-West Germanic in chapters 3–5. The focus of chapter 3 is the defining phonological innovations of the Proto-West Germanic branch, while chapter 4 focuses on the morphological system of inflectional categories and aspects of the lexicon unique to West Germanic—both those due to innovation and to borrowing. Chapter 5 examines further diversification of dialects within West Germanic, homing in on the northern West Germanic dialect region from which the later English dialects of Britain would stem.

These chapters serve as background for the larger account of the immediate prehistory of Old English in chapters 6 and 7, and the Old English period in chapter 8. These final three chapters comprise almost two thirds of the book's 509 pages of history. The pre-Old English period is described as beginning either with the Germanic migrations to Britain or during the immediately preceding period when the ancestors of the Old English dialects were still spoken along the continent's North Sea coast. Chapter 6 (the largest of the three final chapters) is dedicated to a detailed account of the sound changes in the pre-Old English period. The corresponding changes to the morphological system follow in chapter 7.

While phonology and morphology are treated in chapters 2–7, which discuss each of the language's chronological stages, the description of syntax is postponed until chapter 8. This is a substantial chapter of over 100 pages, which describes the syntactic system of the Old English period itself. The coverage here is broadly descriptive, focusing “on constructions that differ from the Present Day English (PDE) in interesting ways, and to some extent, those that have received most attention in the recent literature” (p. 392). This chapter necessarily draws more heavily on existing theoretical analyses than do the preceding chapters on phonology and morphology because these analyses help to elucidate the structures and facilitate their description. Taylor describes her own approach as “loosely generative” (p. 392), but she seamlessly incorporates the contributions of other scholars in her discussions, where they give richness to her topic overviews. Syntactic data are taken from the 2003 York-Toronto-Helsinki parsed corpus of Old English prose of which Taylor was an editor (YCOE; Taylor et al. Reference Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk and Beths2003).

There is ample detail throughout the book to illustrate important points of discussion. In chapter 4, for instance, Ringe lists all the loanwords that were most likely borrowed from Latin during the Proto-West Germanic period along with the reflexes of each word in the various dialects. Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of the loss of nasals before voiceless fricatives during this period, illustrating how this was one of two changes in which Old Saxon participated fully. Ringe states that there are around 30 clear instances of words that were affected by this change. He proceeds to list them all with their cognates in Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German.

In the later chapters on Old English and its immediate prehistory, data abounds; these data are accompanied by glosses, full citations of ancestral forms at each relevant stage, relevant dialectal and intradialectal variants, Gothic and Old Norse comparison forms, and full morphosyntactic parsing. In the syntax chapter, the source text and location in the YCOE are given. Such well-outfitted examples facilitate further research, as do the references to related scholarship in the authors' analysis of each innovation mentioned above. Providing such detail takes considerable time and effort, but the reader is the beneficiary here, where no shortcuts were taken in providing data.

This same level of detail continues in the volume's extensive index divided into three main sections. The first is a word index for each of the stages in the history of Old English covered in the volume, including a short list of those words for which Indo-European roots are provided somewhere in the book. The second section is a list of those attested English forms—from Old English to the present—that are discussed in the text. The final section is an index of syntactic topics covered in chapter 8.

While forms that serve as exemplars of morphological paradigms are so noted in the word lists, the index does not include names of individual morphological categories or of specific phonological or morphological changes. To find a particular innovation the reader would need to locate it under the rubric of its general type and period of change in the detailed Table of Contents. This omission is likely to be a greater impediment to scholars less familiar with the individual changes and the periods in which they occurred. For the scholar of early Germanic and prehistoric English accustomed to working with historical Germanic grammars, however, it might not warrant a second thought. There is also an addenda and corrigenda to the first volume here at the end of volume II, followed by a substantial list of references.

The Development of Old English is a most welcome new addition to the existing literature on the history of Old English. The writing is lucid and the arguments are clearly laid out with copious and illustrative examples. This volume would serve well as both a detailed reference grammar and a jumping off point for further research in topics of early historical English and Germanic linguistics.