Philology is the study of language through historical texts, focusing on the origins and development of a language. It differs from linguistics in its use of psychology, anthropology, and history. Philology can be divided into subfields such as comparative philology, textual word analysis, cognitive philology, and deciphering. Philologists typically focus on a certain group of languages, such as classical Romance or oriental languages.
Philology is the study of language through the use of classical or historical texts. This field of study takes its name from the ancient Greek terms which represent love and words, so that philology can be translated as love of learning or love of words. People who study philology are primarily concerned with historical language, rather than modern language development. Rather than focusing on oral tradition, philology practitioners focus on ancient written texts and documents, including famous and everyday writings.
This field shares many characteristics with linguistics, leading many people to confuse these two distinct methods of studying language. Linguistics tends to be highly scientific and includes a great deal of technical analysis. It is also mainly based on linguistic structure and is based on both written and oral sources. Philology tends to be less scientific and instead relies on a combination of psychology, anthropology, and history to analyze words and languages.
A major focus of philology is the historical development, or origins, of a language. Academics in this field work to trace the roots of a language and to determine how it spread across different regions or countries. They also attempt to analyze how language within a specific historical period relates to events occurring at that time. Finally, they try to see what kind of information or clues that language can provide about the people who spoke it, or about the time or place where it was spoken.
Philology can be divided into several subfields based on the goals and interests of different researchers. Comparative philology deals with how languages relate to each other, as well as the similarities and differences between them. Those interested in textual word analysis use philological principles to analyze literature and combine multiple versions of a manuscript. This type of study is especially prevalent in Bible study.
Cognitive philology focuses on how historical texts can help define the psychological and intelligence aspects of man, or an individual. Thus, this field includes attributes of psychology and philosophy. Finally, philological researchers may specialize in deciphering, which includes deciphering old texts or even cracking the code of a dead language.
Philologists typically choose to focus on a certain group of languages with similar origins. This is often necessary due to the large differences in structure, history and development between Eastern and Western dialects, for example. Many publications and study programs in this field are oriented towards classical Romance languages, such as Greek and Latin, or oriental languages such as Chinese, Sanskrit or Arabic.
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