Well, I never did keep up with this blog the way I meant to. I mostly blame getting into the last year of my doctorate and having my thesis eat up all of my energies, and by the time that was over blogging wasn't really on my mind. It didn't help that I was mostly inspired by a specific congruence of publications about the Indo-European 'homeland' problem, and so didn't really go into it with any long-term goals or plans.
Now, a few years on, I'd like to return to writing some more semi-formal things, focusing on a series of posts on the history of the English language. Each post will take one word as a hook, and use it to talk about some topic related to the development of English, going in roughly chronological order from the origins of language up to the present. (This isn't an entirely original idea, though I actually wasn't consciously aware of David Crystal's The Story of English in 100 Words when I outlined this project; having looked at Crystal's book, I think I'm still in no danger of redundancy, since our approaches are very different.)
One of the things I'd like to do with this series is shake up the usual idea that the history of English should focus especially on the development of 'English' as a separate language, starting with Old English and only including earlier periods as a kind of preface or background. If all goes as planned, I'll get to Old English in due course, but not for a very long time: roughly speaking, Old English might be said to begin around some 1500 years ago, and there's a good 3500 years or more before that of linguistic prehistory that we can talk about in some substantive way.
In any case, this will certainly be a longer project, and I'm hoping to post on a semi-regular basis. I've created a new platform so the series can have a dedicated home, uninterrupted by any unrelated content I may choose to post (not that I have any concrete plans for other posts at the moment, but I don't want to nail down the coffin lid here) -- https://historyofenglish.joomla.com/index.php -- but I'll also copy the posts here as well.
