Comparative philology

“ Some courage is required to attack the subject of comparative philology as treated by certain learned authors; they are bold enough to seek to transport themselves to an age of such remote antiquity that history is silent on the subject, but in which a nascent humanity endeavoured to find expression for its sensations in a language which probably had no name. ”

“ On the contrary, he considers that in them the life and growth of language is seen more clearly than in dead literary languages, on whose study the science of comparative philology was at first exclusively built up. ”

“ Whether there is any hope that comparative philology may ultimately be prosecuted with sufficient success to lead all the varied forms of human speech back to a single origin, is an interesting speculation. ”

“ The task which he has set himself is a very delicate one—it demands an equal knowledge of philology, literature, and popular usage, and a keen faculty for discerning things that under apparent resemblances really differ, and things that under various and unlike forms, have common root ideas. The philologist has to deal with only one root word. The compiler of a book of synonyms must be, so to speak, a compound philologist, and must have in hand, for comparative purposes, several root words. Nor, again, is philology a sufficient guide, for the significance of words changes in popular usage ”

“ The invention of comparative philology, with its even more recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now find "linguistic" and "literary" used by common consent as things not merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the part of linguistics to claim the term "scholarship" exclusively for itself.
This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the abstract value of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, it is perhaps not necessary here to inquire. ”

“ It is because they differ, at first sight, that the discovery of their resemblance is important. And it is on that aspect of the truth that the comparative method of science dwells. Comparative philology, for instance, devotes itself to establishing resemblances between, say, the Indo-European languages, which for long were not suspected to bear any likeness to one another or to have any connection with each other. ”

“ Neither in Germany, which may well be called the birthplace of this science, nor in France, where it has been cultivated with brilliant success, has that title been adopted. It will not be difficult to show that, although the science of language owes much to the classical scholar, and though in return it has proved of great use to him, yet comparative philology has really nothing whatever in common with philology in the usual meaning of the word. Philology, whether classical or oriental, whether treating of ancient or modern, of cultivated or barbarous languages, is an historical science. ”

“ The theory which is suggested to us by an analysis of language carried out according to the principles of comparative philology is the very opposite. We arrive in the end at roots, and every one of these expresses a general, not an individual, idea. Every name, if we analyze it, contains a predicate by which the object to which the name applies was known. ”

“ A young man just entering the domain of classical philology, and getting his first ranges over the fields of classical literature, is sure to have a distorted idea of the relative superiority of those literatures, from comparative ignorance both of other ancient and of modern literatures. ”

“ This may in some way be accounted for by the ignorance of scholars before our day of the principles of Comparative Grammar, that ingenious art of criticism which becomes the key by which modern philology is enabled to enter the deep recesses of the past, and expose to view records which, for want of it, were inaccessible to the ancient Greeks and Romans and the great scholars of the last three centuries ”

“ It may be said, with truth, that modern philology has a method far more scientific and patient than the random practice of old etymology. Granted, but a glance at the various philological interpretations, for example, of Greek mythical names, will shew that philologists still differ on most mythical points where difference is possible. When applied to the interpretation of the past of human thought and human history, philology is a most uncertain guide. ”

“ We demand thanks—not in our own name, for we are but atoms—but in the name of philology itself, which is indeed neither a Muse nor a Grace, but a messenger of the gods: and just as the Muses descended upon the dull and tormented Boeotian peasants, so Philology comes into a world full of gloomy colours and pictures, full of the deepest, most incurable woes; and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful and godlike figure of a distant, rosy, and happy fairyland. ”

“ Most of them are ridiculously bad, and yet among them are found, as if by accident, principles of philology which are unsurpassed in any ancient writer, and even in advance of any philologer of the last century. ”

“ Philology should be studied as the most important of sciences, not only for the sake of knowing the works of art and science that the various languages contain, but because words themselves are growths of nature and works of art, capable of giving the highest delight as such; and because their analysis and history reveal the universe in its symbolic character. Moreover, no language, learned in the light of philology, could be forgotten. ”

“ The mistake made by philologists, however, has been in assuming that philology is the principal means of understanding the phenomena of linguistics; whereas in truth it is only one means of studying them. ”

“ And even Avenarius, who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience.
All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology. And philology, with its great and fruitful law of analogical formations, opens wide the door to chance, to the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. ”

“ Moreover, if what some call the philosophy of language, were to supersede, altogether, the province of philology as it applies to the present, progressive and refined state of English literature, the great object contemplated by the learned, in all ages, namely, the approximation of language, in common with every thing else, to that point of perfection at which it is the object of correct philology to arrive, would be frustrated. ”

“ Now literature is one of the arts, and philology is a science. Though men of letters have to use words as the tools of their trade, orthography is none the less a branch of philology, and philology does not come by nature. ”

“ There is doubtless a secondary sense in which purely philological science may be fairly called physical, just as there is a secondary sense in which pure ethnology may be called historical. That is to say, philology has to deal with physical phenomena, so far as it has to deal with the physical aspect of the sounds of which human language is made up. ”

“ Since the middle of the 19th century the word has been used in a more restricted sense. Whereas philology formerly meant the study of literature, it is now limited to the study of languages, apart from the literature embodied in them. ”

“ To any who may allege that some primitive fiction was devised by some primitive priesthood, before yet mankind had diverged from a common centre, a reply is furnished by philology; for philology proves the dispersion of mankind to have commenced before there existed a language sufficiently organized to express religious ideas. Moreover, were it otherwise tenable, the hypothesis of artificial origin fails to account for the facts. ”

“ I will only say that I believe that it is precisely the change which the progress of modern philology is bringing about; that it is fitting modern languages, and preeminently our own, to become the instrument of a true mental discipline, so far as language-study can serve as such an instrument. ”

“ I do not presume to represent myself as an original investigator, nor do I aspire to a greater distinction than that of representing clearly and intelligently the views of those distinguished writers who have made the study of philology the chief pursuit of their lives. ”

“ When we observe how few philologists there actually are, except those that have taken up philology as a means of livelihood, we can easily decide for ourselves what is the matter with this impulse for antiquity: it hardly exists at all, for there are no disinterested philologists. ”

“ But I was reassured on this point by learning that Philology, as the subject of this Section, was intended to be taken in that larger and undoubtedly fitter sense of the word which it bears in other countries, and to which the usage of scholars ought certainly to fix it in our own—that is to say, the study of language and of literature without distinction between ancient and modern, and without exclusion of anything which is needed for the full comprehension and illustration of either. ”

“ These gentlemen are extremely useful in their way and place; but the study of philology is not the study of literature. It is at best one of its humble bond-slaves. A philologist may be minutely acquainted with every twig in the family-tree of each obsolete word in the entire range of Elizabethan literature, and yet be as darkly and as completely ignorant of that glorious world of poetry as the stokers in an ocean steamer are of the beauty of the sunset seen from the deck. ”

“ What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit—the capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. ”

“ They, however, who possess the greatest knowledge of antiquity should likewise possess the greatest amount of culture, viz., our philologists; but what is classical about them?
67
Classical philology is the basis of the most shallow rationalism always having been dishonestly applied, it has gradually become quite ineffective. Its effect is one more illusion of the modern man. Philologists are nothing but a guild of sky-pilots who are [Pg 146] not known as such · this is why the State takes an interest in them. ”

“ In fact, whenever literary language and ideas cease to be in a manner common property, literature tends either towards imitation work or to become specialised, to become science in a literary dress-as not a little of our metaphysical poetry has been of late. Such facts as these bring out prominently the relation of comparative thinking and of the comparative method to literature. Is the circle of common speech and thought, the circle of the group's comparative thinking, as narrow as a tribal league? ”

“ We have only to turn our attention to the greatest part of our modern histories of literature, whether written by a single philologist or by a learned society, to realize that [Pg 260] that which is philology in them is not history, but repertory; and the rest, which is history, is not philology, but a vivid reaction, an act of present life, by which some at least of the documents of the past (since some philologists are men) have suddenly become part of the actual experience of the writer, answered his spiritual need, stirred that which is still human in his soul. ”

“ I think I have recognised in my examination of the question that all our philology—that is, all its present existence and power—is based on the same foundation as that on which our view of antiquity as the most important of all means of training is based. Philology as a means of instruction is the clear expression of a predominating conception regarding the value of antiquity, and the best methods of education. ”

“ A Word for Philologists.—It is thought that there are books so valuable and royal that whole generations of scholars are well employed when through their efforts these books are kept genuine and intelligible,—to confirm this belief again and again is the purpose of philology. ”

“ It is not a question of absolute propriety or correctness, since the word philology is in its nature wide enough to imply all language-study of whatever kind; it is one, rather, of the convenient distinction of methods that have grown too independent and important to be any longer well included under a common name.
I —The Science of Language in general.
Philology, in all its departments, began and grew up as classical; the history of our civilization made the study of Greek and Latin long the exclusive, still longer the predominant and regulating, occupation of secular scholarship. ”

“ It is especially philology which is the most efficient instrument demonstrating the existence and the superiority of a distinct race. Just as anatomy reveals to us the structure of the cranium, so philology reveals to us the structure of the mind. ”

“ In the region of history, as he shews, the best philologists contradict each other and themselves, as to the metals possessed by the early Aryans. Yet philology is the science which claims possession of "the only method that can lead to scientific results," results which differ with the views of each individual scholar. ”

“ Wherever ethic and metaphysic are left, the merest philology seems to have been the only alternative—the few phrases attributed to any writers of this period that bear a different complexion being very few, uncertainly authentic, and in almost every case extremely vague. ”

“ Of all sciences philology at present is the most favoured · its progress having been furthered for centuries by the greatest number of scholars in every nation who have had charge of the noblest pupils. Philology has thus had one of the best of all opportunities to be propagated from generation to generation, and to make itself respected. ”

“ The significations, therefore, with which the comparative philologist has to concern himself, are those unconsciously agreed upon by a body of men, or rather the common group of ideas suggested by a word to all of them alike. Here, again, some general causes must be at work which may yet be revealed by a careful analysis. The comparative philologist has not to trouble himself, like the classical philologist, with discovering the exact ideas connected with a word by some individual author ”