Don Ringe is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He was educated at the Universities of Kentucky, Oxford, and Yale and has taught classical studies and linguistics at university level since 1983. His numerous publications on comparative Indo-European linguistics, historical linguistics, and computational cladistics include On the Chronology of Sound Changes in Tocharian (American Oriental Society 1996) and Historical Linguistics: Towards a Twenty-First Century Reintegration (with Joseph F. Eska; CUP 2013).

This book describes 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 focus throughout the book is on linguistic structure. In the course of his exposition Professor Ringe draws on a long tradition of work on many languages, including Hittite, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavic, Gothic, and Old Norse. Written to be intelligible to those with a background in modern linguistic theory, 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 in the History will consider the development of Proto-Germanic into Old English. Subsequent volumes will describe the attested history of English from the Anglo-Saxon era to the present.