This book presents an exhaustive treatment of a long-standing problem of Proto-Indo-European and Italic philology: the development of the Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates in the ancient languages of Italy. In so doing it tackles a central issue of historical linguistics: the plausibility of explanations for sound change.

This book is the first since 1897 to describe the earliest reconstructable stages of the prehistory of English. It outlines the grammar of Proto-Indo-European, considers the changes by which one dialect of that prehistoric language developed into Proto-Germanic, and provides a detailed account of the grammar of Proto-Germanic. The first volume in Don Ringe's A Linguistic History of English will be of central interest to all scholars and students of comparative Indo-European and Germanic linguistics, the history of English, and historical linguists. The next volume will consider the development of Proto-Germanic into Old English. Subsequent volumes will describe the attested history of English from the Old English period to the present.