Philology

Not to be confused with Philosophy.

Philology (from Ancient Greek φιλολογία (philología) 'love of word') is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts and oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. In older usage, especially British, philology is conflated with comparative and historical linguistics, to which it is closely related.

Classical philology, a subfield of Classics, studies Classical languages. Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BC during the Hellenistic Period, and was continued by the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Romans during the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. Latin philology was maintained in the Latin West during the Middle Ages, while Greek/Hellenic philology was maintained in the Byzantine Empire during the same period. Greco-Roman philology was also practiced separately in the Islamic World during the Islamic Golden Age, though it eventually died out and was forgotten there in the centuries afterward. It was reunited and reinvigorated by European scholars of the Renaissance, where it was soon joined by philologies of other European (Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Finnish, Hungarian, Armenian, Kartvelian, Etruscan, Albanian, etc.), Biblical, Ancient Near Eastern and Middle Eastern (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Coptic, Hittite, Iranian, Arabic, Jewish, etc.) South Asian (Sanskrit, Dravidian), etc.), East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.), African (Ethiopian, Nubian, etc.), and Native American (e.g. Mayan) languages, among various others. Indo-European studies involve the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages, while Semitic studies, Indology, and East Asian studies do the same for Semitic languages, Indic languages, and East Asian languages, respectively, with many other similar disciplines existing. The invention and development of the discipline is polycentric, not exclusive to the Western world, though the word itself is of Western origin.

Though the terms philology and classical language were originally used to describe Greek and Latin and their study in the context of Western Classical studies, and later extended in the West to Biblical Hebrew in Biblical studies, any language with a historical record can be studied philologically, and describing a language as "classical" is to additionally imply the existence of a pre-modern philological tradition associated with it, due to the essential criteria used to define the concept. Edward Sapir was a notable early advocate of extending the term “classical language” to Non-Western languages and their literary and scholarly traditions.

Within linguistics, Philology, with its focus on historical development (diachronic analysis), is contrasted with Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis. While the contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and the emphasis of Noam Chomsky on syntax, research in historical and comparative linguistics often relies on philological materials and findings, and historical and comparative linguistics are often considered subfields of it or vice versa. Philology is itself often considered a subfield of linguistics or a distinct, closely related discipline. J.R.R. Tolkien is one of the most iconic and recognized examples of a philologist, and the literary works of his mythopoeia were strongly influenced by his profession.