Historical Linguistics

History of the English Language Home Page - A prime starting point for the study of historical linguistics, maintained by Dan Mosser of Virginia Tech.

The History of Historical Linguistics - A brief account of the development of the field of historical linguistics by Steen Schousboe of Copenhagen (contains a good bibliography).

A Brief History of Dictionaries - From the "Focus on Words" web site, this issue of John Robertson’s  newsletter contains a concise history of dictionaries from the beginning of time up to the OED.

Language Exploration: a Project of Maricopa Community College - An excellent introduction to language and historical linguistics with audio examples of words for comparison. (You may have to set the Preferences in your browser to make the illustrations work.)

Emily's Introduction to Historical Linguistics 

Emily's Guide to Languages and Linguistics - I don't know who Emily Hanna is (an amateur word lover, apparently), but these two sites have good, reliable introductory material clearly explained with a minimum of technical terminology.

Corpora and Historical Linguistics - A brief introduction to the Helsinki Corpus and the concept of "corpus-based historical linguistics."

Nostratic - Bibliography for a fairly recent and controversial trend in historical linguistics, the effort to extend speculation about the origins of language beyond Proto-Indo-European to "Proto-World," often by-passing traditional methods of historical reconstruction.

Sanskrit Home Page - The foundation of the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European was the comparison of Greek and Latin with Sanskrit. This is a collection of links and information that allow you to make your own comparisons.

The Word Detective - Articles on word origins by Evan Morris, a language columnist for the New York Daily News. Entertaining and informative.