Q: Why are you even doing this?
A: Not for the money! I’m an academic, and spend a lot of my time working on research projects that involve fairly technical matters. I do try to write my academic publications in a way that isn’t totally forbidding to a non-specialist, but the audience is basically academic. I think there’s a real place for that, but I also think it’s good for us academic types to not just publish things like that. The history of English is pretty interesting (well, at least I think so, and I guess you do to if you’re here), and we’re always learning more about it (thanks to those academic articles and monographs). The story I want to tell isn’t totally different from what you’ll find in something like in the old documentary The Story of English, which is now 40 years old, but it definitely isn’t the same story either.
Q: Where can I learn more?
A: The answer here really depends on how academic you want to get. There are lots of textbooks on the history of English, generally aimed at undergrad students, but no one’s stopping you from reading them. One good one that’s also conveniently open-access is by Hejná & Walkden. There are also various academic reference works, like the Cambridge History of English series, though these things tend to be expensive, and since it’s hard to put together a big reference work like that, such projects only occur periodically and tend to get used even after they’ve become a bit dated. Rather than try and point you to a million different resources for each facet of the topic in this Q&A, each post in the series as a “further reading” section, so check those out for more targeted recommendations.
Q: Your last name, Goering, is weird. How do you say it?
A: I rhyme it with herring.
Q: What’s this symbol you’re using for a logo?
A: It’s an old form of the Chinese character 木, which means “tree”, and is pronounced mù in modern Mandarin Chinese. I picked it because trees are one of the big symbols in historical linguistics (tree diagrams are used to depict relationships between related languages), and because I thought it looked nice. (By “old form”, I mean small seal script, for anyone who’s interested.)