Philology

[1][2][3] 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.

While the contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and the emphasis of Noam Chomsky on syntax, research in historical linguistics often relies on philological materials and findings.

The term changed little with the Latin philologia, and later entered the English language in the 16th century, from the Middle French philologie, in the sense of 'love of literature'.

Due to the rapid progress made in understanding sound laws and language change, the "golden age of philology" lasted throughout the 19th century, or "from Giacomo Leopardi and Friedrich Schlegel to Nietzsche".

This branch of research arose among ancient scholars in the Greek-speaking world of the 4th century BC, who desired to establish a standard text of popular authors for both sound interpretation and secure transmission.

Some scholars avoid all critical methods of textual philology,[10] especially in historical linguistics, where it is important to study the actual recorded materials.

The movement known as new philology has rejected textual criticism because it injects editorial interpretations into the text and destroys the integrity of the individual manuscript, hence damaging the reliability of the data.

Beginning with the famous decipherment and translation of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, some individuals attempted to decipher the writing systems of the Ancient Near East and Aegean.

In the mid-19th century, Henry Rawlinson and others deciphered the Behistun Inscription, which records the same text in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, using a variation of cuneiform for each language.

Work continues on scripts such as the Maya, with great progress since the initial breakthroughs of the phonetic approach championed by Yuri Knorozov and others in the 1950s.

[15][16] Based on the harsh critique of Friedrich Nietzsche, some US scholars since the 1980s have viewed philology as responsible for a narrowly scientistic study of language and literature.

[12] Disagreements in the modern day of this branch of study are followed with the likes of how the method is treated among other scholars, as noted by both the philologists R.D Fulk and Leonard Neidorf who have been quoted saying "This field "philology's commitment to falsification renders it "at odds with what many literary scholars believe because the purpose of philology is to narrow the range of possible interpretations rather than to treat all reasonable ones as equal".

Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, the main character in Alexander McCall Smith's 1997 comic novel Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a philologist, educated at Cambridge.