Philology vs. linguistics
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Linguistics is a relatively young discipline, formally dating from roughly the mid-19th century. In the study of language, it was preceded by philology, which has hoary roots going all the way back to Pāṇini (520-460 BC) and beyond.
In my own lifetime, until recently I preferred to identify myself as a philologist, but that met with too many dumb stares, so I gave up on that. Now, however, I find that there is a World Philology Union to carry the torch for this venerable profession, so perhaps there's hope for reviving my lost lifework after all.
From the WPU's website:
The World Philology Union (WPU) was founded on 2 December 2021 in Oslo, Norway. The WPU is an international association whose purpose is to promote philology worldwide, in research, education, society and culture.
The first General Assembly of the WPU was held in Rome, 15 December 2022. At the same occasion, the first WPU conference was held, 14–16 December, hosted by the Sapienza University of Rome and ISMEO – The International Association of Mediterranean and Oriental Studies. This conference discussed the current state of philology at universities and other academic institutions worldwide.
…
The philological study of ancient and classical texts, traditionally the very core of the humanities, has during the last generation or so been either completely marginalized within university departments or, at some universities, even altogether banished from the academic portfolio. This development is partly due to general policies of higher education, but one can argue that it is primarily a consequence of trends within the humanities themselves.
While there is ample reason to lament this development, one must also take action to ensure the preservation and flourishing of the rich academic traditions within the different fields of philology. Without these fields, which historically and conceptually lie at the very core of the study of human culture, the very existence of the humanities as a meaningful academic activity is at risk. It should also be emphasised that any effort to sustain and develop studies and research on historical languages today must include all the major literary traditions of the world.
Philologists in all fields should unite to promote philology as a unified discipline on all levels of education and research. This is the purpose of the World Philology Union (WPU).
…
The founding members of the WPU recognize that philology is not only a method within other fields. The philological approach is indeed in itself an autonomous discipline – intrinsically comparative and genuinely global and macro-historical.
The WPU will expressly encourage global membership and promote philological research projects involving international collaboration. It will support younger researchers and seek to procure funding for their projects in the form of scholarships. The union will support existing philological programs at universities and help establish new ones. An important task will be to help the traditionally distinct philological traditions explore each other’s insights and perspectives, and encourage research projects that require the participation of more than one philological tradition. The overall goal of the WPU will be to help secure recognition of philology as one of the most central and useful disciplines in the humanities.
While the later meaning of the word philology is not necessarily directly related to its use by Plato in the Phaedrus, it is not uncommon that also practitioners of philology in the modern meaning incorporate into their craft something of the old meaning, viz. “love of intellectual discourse” (in the Greek context the latter is incidentally more or less synonymous with “predilection for table talk”). To appreciate the whole story, one needs to start from the beginning of the Phaedrus. The passage in question is a part of Socrates' initial refusal to give a speech on friendship (227a–237a). Text with translation and references on Perseus.
So far as I can tell, the membership of the WPU is almost exclusively European and Northeast Asian, with only one American. This is not to say that we in North America are uninterested in philology, for which see "Selected readings" below. Since the numbers on both sides of the The Pond are minimal, we should join forces and work toward the revitalization of this noble discipline.
Selected readings
- "Philology and Sinology" (4/20/14)
- "What would a 'return to philology' be a return to?" (4/19/14)
- "Playing philologist at summer camp" (4/20/14)
- "Chinese, Greek, and Latin" (8/8/17)
- "'In Pāṇini We Trust'" (12/15/22)
- "Implementing Pāṇini's grammar" (12/1/23)
[Thanks to Jens Braarvig]
KeithB said,
March 14, 2025 @ 8:05 am
JRR Tolkien was a philologist.
Chris Button said,
March 14, 2025 @ 9:05 am
For me, the overlap between philology and linguists can be found in the distinction between historical and comparative linguistics.
Comparative linguistics may be conducted by:
1. Linguists who compare related living languages. They understand phonetics, phonology, etc.
2. Philologists who compare dead or older versions of languages with living languages. They understand old inscriptions, texts, etc.
If you do both kinds of comparative linguistics then you are a "historical linguist".
TR said,
March 14, 2025 @ 11:40 am
Pāṇini by any definition was surely a linguist rather than a philologist.
katarina said,
March 14, 2025 @ 1:12 pm
Googling "philology meaning" , I found that _philology_ means
Linguistics
and
(in North America) literary and classical scholarship.
Professor Mair has done work in linguistics (per Google, the scientific study of language) , as well as literary scholarship, e.g., most popularly his translations of the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), and Sunzi (Sun Tzu)'s Art of War.
David Marjanović said,
March 14, 2025 @ 4:51 pm
Yeah, he didn't work with texts at all, so if that's your definition of philology it only became possible in India a few hundred years after his death. Other definitions abound, of course.
(India had phonology before it had writing, and it shows.)
Lucas Christopoulos said,
March 15, 2025 @ 2:58 am
Pāṇini is the first Indian who supposedly talked about Greeks (the Yavana people) in the Aṣṭādhyāyī (Sanskrit: अष्टाध्यायी), around 350 BC. This could perhaps indicate some form of contact in literature too. The Aṣṭādhyāyī was composed at the time of Plato, related or not.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
March 15, 2025 @ 4:08 am
According to Bronkhorst (Bronkhorst, Johannes;2019, A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought, Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231548311):
"…thanks to the work carried out by Hinüber (1990:34-35) and Falk (1993: 303-304), we now know that Pāṇini lived, in all probability, far closer in time to the period of Aśoka than had hitherto been thought. According to Falk's reasoning, Panini must have lived during the decade following 350 BCE, that is, just before (or contemporaneously with?) the invasion by Alexander of Macedonia."
David Marjanović said,
March 15, 2025 @ 3:31 pm
Unlike anything Plato (or Aristotle) wrote, however, it's painfully obviously designed to be learned by heart. There are still people who recite the whole thing from memory (which takes some 2 1/2 hours). IIRC it's even on YouTube somewhere.
It's entirely possible that Pāṇini knew about the existence of writing (in Aramaic and maybe even Greek); it just played no role in his work on Sanskrit.
David Morris said,
March 15, 2025 @ 5:09 pm
Surely. philology is the academic study of love … (tongue-in-cheek).
david said,
March 15, 2025 @ 6:56 pm
@Lucas Christopoulos
Wikipedia says Yavana is a Sanskrit transliteration of Ionia and variants were mentioned in the Edicts of Ashoka and the hebrew bible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yona
Lucas Christopoulos said,
March 15, 2025 @ 7:29 pm
"It's entirely possible that Pāṇini knew about the existence of writing (in Aramaic and maybe even Greek); it just played no role in his work on Sanskrit."
Possible? Or even Greek? Why "possible" or "even"? They ruled some areas there for 300 years in Northwest India. You are just missing a cultural admixture in your analysis. After Alexander, there was a complete scholarly exchange in various domains between the Greeks and the Indians. Pyrrhos of Elis in the Peloponnese even brought back Buddhist ideas there and founded a new Philosophical school. Hellenic structures of texts in early Indian literature did play a role. This fact is acknowledged by many scholars. The Mahabharata, and even more in texts (Sutras) associated with (Helleno-) Buddhism.
Coby said,
March 15, 2025 @ 8:17 pm
The French department at Columbia is still called "French and Romance Philology", but I was never sure if that was "[French and Romance] Philology" or "French and [Romance Philology]".
In Spain, the language departments are usually called filología (anglesa, francesa…).
Coby said,
March 15, 2025 @ 8:18 pm
Sorry, that was meant to be inglesa. (I was thinking in Catalan.)
Gokul Madhavan said,
March 16, 2025 @ 2:21 am
Not only did Pāṇini know of the Greeks (yavanas, lit. “Ionians”), but he also appears to have been familiar with the existence of their writing system. AFAIK the word yavana occurs only once in the Aṣṭādhyāyī, in sūtra 4.1.49. It is part of a list of words which take the infix -ān (called ānuk by Pāṇini) when forming their feminine form with the -ī suffix (called ṅīṣ by Pāṇini). Thus the feminine form of the masculine yavana is not *yavanī but yavanānī.
What is interesting is that the commentators gloss yavanānī as yavanānām lipiḥ “the script of the Ionians” or yavanāl lipyām “in the sense of a script from (the) Ionia(n)”. It would appear that yavanānī may either not have been the general term for an Ionian woman, or may have acquired this specialized meaning at some point which came to dominate its sense at a point when active Greek presence on the Indian frontier had faded out. [Most other Indic scripts have feminine names (a fact which had eluded me until this moment): Devanāgarī, Maithilī, Śāradā, and so on. The two exceptions that come to mind are Grantha (masculine) and Siddham (neuter).] I know no Greek, so I do not know what the original Greek words for “Ionian woman” or for the Greek script would have been.
Now it’s true that this specialized meaning of yavanānī is not directly attested by Pāṇini, so it is theoretically possible that he himself may not have known of their writing system even while being aware of the Greek presence in the region.
Yves Rehbein said,
March 16, 2025 @ 4:09 am
I am not a greckicist but I want to take a guess 1. to write is graph-, so writing may be grapheme 2. Ionian becomes ywnj in Egyptian too, probably a Semitic loanword, already i-ja-wo-ne in Linear B, and I believe this is tangential to Jonas, Aramaic יונא (yawnā’, "dove"), Hebrew יוֹנָה (yoná), Ge'ez wanos etc. Ergo: yavanānī is pretty much chicken scratch.
Jason Merchant said,
March 16, 2025 @ 9:52 am
There are many US-based members of the World Philology Union–the website only lists the members of the board (where Martha Roth does appear to be the only current American academic on it).
Roscoe said,
March 16, 2025 @ 11:15 am
Ontology recapitulates philology.
Rodger C said,
March 16, 2025 @ 12:22 pm
It may clarify matters for some people to point out that Ἰῶνες < Ἰάϝωνες.
JPL said,
March 17, 2025 @ 1:03 am
I was hoping to see some detailed response here to the concerns of the OP, about the future direction for philology, especially wrt its relation to the field of linguistics. I'm not a philologist, but, in the interest of further discussion of this very interesting and important question, I could offer, with trepidation, the view of somebody who was concerned with it.
In a comment on one of the earlier posts listed ("What would a return to philology be a return to?") Rod Johnson mentions a book, Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology, by A.L. "Pete" Becker, wherein just these concerns are addressed. Becker was a linguist, but he was a philologiphile linguist. I don't think he would see philology and linguistics as necessarily incompatible or in conflict, but he would see the approach of philology to the study of human language as containing values and insights that would also improve linguistics, especially descriptive linguistics. E.g., he would probably look with disappointment at any attempt to describe the grammar of a language using mainly the principles of Chomskyan theory as leaving out everything of interest, and say that there is a better way to approach grammar writing; but he also wanted to take a more modern approach to philology that made use of more recent insights.
On p.5 of his book Becker gives a quotation from "the Spanish philosopher and philologist" Ortega y Gasset that expresses an observation that he considers fundamental, even "axiomatic", for any "new philology".
"Two apparently contradictory laws are involved in all uttering. One says, "Every utterance is deficient" — It says less than it wishes to say. The other law, the opposite, declares, "Every utterance is exuberant — it conveys more than it plans and includes not a few things we would wish left silent."
These laws, i.e., "that all languaging is deficient and says less than we want it to, and that at the same time all languaging is exuberant and says more than we know" (e.g., beyond the usual definitions, etc.), are not obstacles to be overcome, but inescapable features of all languaging activity ("languaging" being Becker's term for language viewed primarily as an activity, i.e., the purposeful use of language in its full human significance in particular communicative contexts, including especially the further significance of the uttering activity.) And getting a better linguistics, as well as getting a better, more "modern", philology, requires getting beyond translation as part of the restrictive image, common in linguistics, of seeing the relation between languages as a relation between two "codes". This is because any translation involves a special case of Ortega's axioms of expression: given a single objective situation talked about and a single "message", e.g., making an accurate description, an object language sentence and its translation into the language of description will have an area of equivalence in what is expressed, but the translation will always involve significant non-equivalences, both deficiencies and exuberances. (See p.7)
JPL said,
March 17, 2025 @ 1:50 am
What applying Ortega's "axioms" in linguistics and philology means might need a bit of clarification. The problem in a descriptive linguistic context is how to account for, to understand, the aspects of what the sentence in the language being described expresses that are not included in what is expressed by the translation (or gloss), and the aspects of what is expressed by the translation that are no part of what is expressed in the original sentence. (See p.7) Becker says, "If Ortega is right, then not everything sayable is sayable in English, and furthermore, not everything is sayable." (p.7) But it seems, to me at least, that instead of trying to express something equivalent to what is expressed in the object language expression and inevitably failing, it is possible to describe what is expressed in the original expression, taking this "what is expressed" as an empirical intentional object. (A description not to be expressed by a single sentence claiming to be thee meaning of the original sentence.)
For a modern philology it is also necessary to get beyond translation. "Translation is not the end point, the final outcome of a philological endeavor. Rather, it is a starting point, the beginning of moving back, looking back, toward the source of the translation." (p.18) Language is not just a means of expressing thought, but a means of formulating the thought itself, and philology needs to be able to talk about what was thought in the original thinking. "Translation fidelity itself demands reciprocity, a sorting out of exuberances and deficiencies, a confession of failures and sleights of hand", a way of making "restitution to those who … 'wrought the words and in that sense own them'." (p.19) This seems like a worthy project to pursue.
.
Nelson Goering said,
March 17, 2025 @ 2:47 am
One of the more practical definitions of philology that I've seen is from R.D. Fulk, who called it the "aggregate of the various modes of inquiry required for the editing of texts in extinct languages". (By "extinct", he clearly means just "not currently spoken in that form", since things like Old English come under this umbrella.) A less romantic definition than some, and not, I think, meant to encompass the rather specific "comparative philology", but nicely grounded.
For vague definitions, I rather like the quip: "philology is the art of reading slowly".
The Fulk quote is from here: Colin J. Grant, “Interview with Robert D. Fulk.” Journal of English Linguistics 42 (2014), 259-79. I've seen the quip attributed to Roman Jakobson and Friedrich Nietzsche, but I don't know what it's actual source is.
KIRINPUTRA said,
March 17, 2025 @ 11:39 pm
This is gold! "[P]hilology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts."
(https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11870)
JPL said,
March 18, 2025 @ 1:35 am
"[P]hilology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts."
That sounds good indeed. But after offering that gold nugget, the writer there goes on to say that philology is "the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning". I certainly could be mistaken, but I don't get the sense that philology has been a theoretical (thus scientific?) discipline, as opposed to a practice or an "art", and, in spite of his talk of "axioms" of languaging, I don't think Pete Becker would have viewed it as such. He was more interested in bringing out and appreciating the haecceity of not only what the text expresses, but also its resonances with other texts. His attitude strikes me as more like that of the literary critic F R Leavis, in being rather "anti-theory"; BTW, and in this my interpretation of Becker's interests is probably coloured by my own obsessions, but I like to think he would say that the critical interpretation of (e.g.) English poetry by English critics should get beyond paraphrase. (However, to have said that might indicate at least an inkling of a theory.) (Also, I'm not sure what a "theory of textuality" would be aiming to explain.)