Philology: the Historical Study of Language and Text

Philology is the discipline that studies languages and texts from the past through their written documents. Its aim is to understand, interpret and edit critically the texts of earlier periods, taking into account the historical changes that both language and culture have undergone since the texts were produced. The word itself comes from the Greek philologia, meaning love of language and study.

Romance Philology studies the languages and literatures descended from Vulgar Latin, the spoken form of Latin used throughout the Roman Empire. When the Empire collapsed, the Latin spoken in different regions evolved differently, giving rise over centuries to the Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan and others. Romance philologists trace this evolution by examining the earliest surviving texts in each language, analysing changes in phonology, morphology and vocabulary.

Germanic Philology covers the languages and literatures of Germanic origin, including English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. For students of English, Germanic philology is particularly relevant because it involves the study of Old English, the form of English spoken before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Old English looks and sounds almost unrecognisable to a modern reader, but it is the direct ancestor of the language used today. Key texts include Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the translations of King Alfred.

Historical linguistics reconstructs how languages change over time. One of its greatest achievements was the nineteenth-century discovery of the systematic sound correspondences between different Indo-European languages, including Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Germanic and Slavic. These correspondences allowed scholars to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical common ancestor of most European and several Asian languages, spoken perhaps six thousand years ago.

A central task of philology is textual criticism: the attempt to reconstruct the original text of a work from the manuscripts or printed editions that have survived. Before printing was invented, all texts were copied by hand, and each copy inevitably introduced errors, alterations or additions. The philologist compares surviving manuscripts, classifies them according to their genealogical relationships and attempts to establish the most authoritative version of the text.