About

I’m a linguist and philologist specialized in the earlier history of the Germanic languages, including Old and Middle English, Old Norse, Gothic, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German. I have obtained grants to conduct postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford and Ghent University. My monograph, Prosody in Medieval English and Norse, published in 2023 and available as an open-access PDF from OUP, explores topics in diachronic foot structure, the interactions between language and verse structure, and the structures of alliterative metres. Specific issues I cover include vowel deletions and reductions in early Old English, the ‘AB’ dialect of early Middle English, and in the runic corpus of early Norse, along with Kaluza’s law in Beowulf, poetic evidence for resolution in Laȝamon’s Brut and the early Middle English Moral Ode (Poema Morale) and the Norse fornyrðislag metre, and Craigie’s law in Norse metre.

I maintain a broad interest in what used to be called Germanic comparative philology, including the phonological and morphological development of the Germanic languages from Proto-Indo-European. This field combines close attention to ancient and medieval texts as the primary sources for information about older languages, and a grounding in the typology of languages around the world and current thinking about the possibilities and constraints concerning how languages and Language in general work. My ongoing blog series The History of the English Language in A Hundred Words aims to bring the full history of English, from its earliest reconstructable prehistory to the present day, to a wider public in a readable and reliable way.

My last name rhymes with herring.

Education

Grinnell College (BA Anthropology, concentration in Linguistics)
University of Oxford (MPhil General Linguistics and Comparative Philology)
University of Oxford (DPhil General Linguistics and Comparative Philology)

Work Shared in CORE

Articles
Book chapters
Conference papers
Book reviews
Reviews

Other Publications

Prosody in Medieval English and Norse. 2023. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Open-access PDF: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/prosody-in-medieval-english-and-norse-9780197267462?cc=us&lang=en&

Gothic [In preparation, with Ryan Sandell]. A Handbook of Ancient Indo-European Grammars, ed. G. Keydana, S. Dalpedri, and S. Skopeteas. Contract with Cambridge University Press.

Blog Posts

  • Hello world! (Old Norse Language and Literature, 2023-10-16)

Projects

Little Words in Early Germanic (FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ghent University)

Norse Influence on Middle English Prosody (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Oxford)

Nelson Goering

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@ngoering

Active 1 month, 2 weeks ago