Philology

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,...