The current website – Studying the History of English – is intended as a resource for linguistics students at various levels who are concerned with the history of the English language. The material in this website is organised into sections, each of which corresponds to a menu on the top row of the desktop. Each menu then leads to a series of sub-menus which contain texts explaining various aspects of the topic of the particular menu. Because of the size of texts, some sub-menus lead to a screen showing a tree on the left and a window on the right, e.g. in the sub-menu on Vocabulary under the Levels menu. You click on the node of a tree to have the associated item displayed on the right. Click on the last node of a tree, labelled Exit to desktop, to return to the initial screen of the website. For texts without an associated tree there is a button at the very top which is labelled Desktop. Clicking on this has the same effect.
The information on this website has been deposited here to allow students to access information on the history of English with maximum ease in the hope that this will heighten their interest in and improve their knowledge of the subject. The material here, the texts, the timelines, the galleries, the bibliographies, etc. have been compiled by the author of this website, Raymond Hickey, and if you use this data for your own work — term essays, publications, presentations or whatever — then you are asked to acknowledge this accordingly.
Remember that for phonetic symbols to be properly displayed on your computer you must download the supplied phonetic font. Go to the sub-menu Technical help in the current menu.
You can browse through this website by navigating through the menus and sub-menus which can be accessed on the top line of the desktop. Alternatively, you can go to the map for the entire website and choose a section from the list presented there.
Site map for Studying the History of English
A further means of accessing information is to go to the list of themes and choose a topic there. This list is somewhat different from the sitemap (which leads to the sections into which the website is divided) in that it is organised on a smaller scale and offers precise information on a particular aspect of the history of English. The list of themes can be reached by clicking on the button Themes at the top of a text window or by clicking on the word themes in the desktop picture or by following this link:
Themes dealt with in Studying the History of English
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Another website by the present author with a similar structure and amount of information, this time for varieties of English throughout the world, which students or scholars might be interested in looking at, can be accessed via the following link: |
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A further resource centre, again by the present author, with information on the history and present-day forms of Irish English, can be reached via this link: |
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PS A word to students: websites do not replace books. They are intended to offer overviews and general information which students can use when beginning their study of a particular subject. When studying the history of English, a website is particularly useful because maps, facsimiles, pictures, etc. can be included. But remember that for linguistic details and analyses there is no substitute for books, so make sure that you progress from here to the printed word.
Raymond Hickey
January 2012
