HDEL - Helpful Websites
This list of sites is by no means comprehensive; with a little bit of surfing, you will be able to find much more. BE careful; make sure your source has some authority. The web is a morass of redundancies (and often trash) in which it can be hard to find an original, authoritative idea. Please let me know about any problems on this page.
General Resources
- Of course, the HEL Timelines for the course should be your key resource here.
- Another timeline, within a very helpful HEL course website, by Elly van Gelderen at Arizona State University. The site also has a great glossary.
- Studying the History of English, a site from Duisberg-Essen University (though in English), has much interesting material to browse through.
- The Ethnologue seeks to catalogue and describe all of the world's languages.
- Learn the phonemic alphabet from SIL (full IPA with sounds), and from the IPA itself. NOTE that some textbooks, such as Millward, use a slightly different phonetic alphabet that varies from the IPA for several consonants.
- You may need to install a font or two on your computer to type the IPA or non-English characters. I recommend Cardo font, the Junicode font, or the Unicode fonts on this page.
Nifty Blogs
Podcasts
- I've mentioned Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language and (often) pop culture from Slate.
- A Way with Words is a radio show about language new and old that you can listen to in podcast form. The shows are broken up into clips so you can pick and choose what you want to learn about.
- The History of English Podcast by Kevin Stroud includes a number of fascinating episodes. He spends a lot of time on each moment, often using an historical text as a platform to describe word histories. As I write this there are 97 episodes, and he's up to the Magna Carta, during Early Middle English period. The same podcaster also produced a podcast about the History of the Alphabet.
Dictionaries
Databases
- The BYU Corpora collect immense sets of data about various Englishes around the world. There are some videos on The Grammar Lab on YouTube that explain how to use it. There is a bit of a learning curve to these, but they are well worth your time.
- The Google Books corpus of American or British English. BYU has developed this search tool on top of the dataset that Google has made available from scanning books, which it used to create its N-Gram viewer. It allows for more complex sets of searches.
- Search Google's N-Grams here directly.
- The Urban Dictionary displays in all of its glory the plasticity and creativity of English.
Pre-history: Indo-European and before
Germanic, Latin, and other close relations
Old and Middle English
- You can learn Old English (or just take a lesson or two) from Murray McGillivray or King Alfred's Grammar book. Peter Baker's pages require an account.
- You can hear Old English aloud from Jeremy Smith, who has a great set of Old, Middle and Early Modern texts to listen to.
- Translate PDE into Old English with the Old English Translator.
- The Old English Coursepack from Oxford has a great set of editions with lots of extras, like maps, recordings, translations, and bibliography.
- Here is an edition of Beowulf in hypertext. Another can be found here.
- The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English and the Linguistic Atlas of Later Middle English map forms of various ME words, among other helpful features.
- Here is a Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, also from the Institute for Historical Dialectology.
- The Middle English Compendium at the University of Michigan. You can look up word definitions, and examples of use in a vast array of Middle English texts.
- On Chaucer and his contemporaries, see the Language pages on the Geoffrey Chaucer website from Harvard. The METRO project gives introductions and short lessons about the Gawain-poet and other contemporaries.
Early Modern English and PDEnglish in Britain
American Englishes
Want to Speak an Accent?
These sites have files you can listen to. You might also put some key terms into YouTube.