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Philology () is the study of language in Oral tradition and writing 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 authentication 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 more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics.
Classical philology studies classical languages. Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BC, and was continued by the Ancient Greeks and then the Romans throughout the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire. It was eventually resumed by European scholars of the Renaissance, where it was soon joined by philologies of other European (Romance, Germanic, Celtic studies, Slavic studies, etc.), Asian (Arabic language, Persian language, Sanskrit, Sinology, etc.), and African (Egyptian, Nubian languages, etc.) languages. Indo-European studies involve the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages.
Philology, with its focus on historical development (diachronic analysis), is contrasted with linguistics due to Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis. 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 adjective φιλόλογος ( philólogos) meant 'fond of discussion or argument, talkative', in Koine Greek, also implying an excessive ("sophism") preference of argument over the love of true wisdom, philosophy]] ( philósophos).
As an allegory of literary erudition, philologia appears in fifth-century postclassical literature (Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii), an idea revived in Late Medieval literature (Chaucer, John Lydgate).
The meaning of "love of learning and literature" was narrowed to "the study of the historical development of languages" (historical linguistics) in 19th-century usage of the term. Due to the rapid progress made in understanding and language change, the "golden age of philology" lasted throughout the 19th century, or "from Giacomo Leopardi and Friedrich Schlegel to Nietzsche".
A related study method known as higher criticism studies the authorship, date, and provenance of text to place such text in a historical context. As these philological issues are often inseparable from issues of interpretation, there is no clear-cut boundary between philology and hermeneutics. When text has a significant political or religious influence (such as the reconstruction of Biblical texts), scholars have difficulty reaching objective conclusions.
Some scholars avoid all critical methods of textual philology, 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. Supporters of new philology insist on a strict "diplomatic" approach: a faithful rendering of the text exactly as found in the manuscript, without emendations.
Work on the ancient languages of the Near East progressed rapidly. In the mid-19th century, Henry Rawlinson and others deciphered the Behistun Inscription, which records the same text in Old Persian, Elamite language, and Akkadian, using a variation of Cuneiform script for each language. The elucidation of cuneiform led to the decipherment of Sumerian. Hittite language was deciphered in 1915 by Bedřich Hrozný.
Linear B, a script used in the ancient Aegean, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, who demonstrated that it recorded an early form of Greek, now known as Mycenaean Greek. Linear A, the writing system that records the still-unknown language of the Minoans, resists deciphering, despite many attempts.
Work continues on scripts such as the Maya script, with great progress since the initial breakthroughs of the phonetic approach championed by Yuri Knorozov and others in the 1950s. Since the late 20th century, the Maya code has been almost completely deciphered, and the Mayan languages are among the most documented and studied in Mesoamerica. The code is described as a logosyllabic style of writing.
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". This use of falsification can be seen in the debate surrounding the etymology of the Old English character Unferth from the heroic epic poem Beowulf.
James Turner further disagrees with how the use of the term is dismissed in the academic world, stating that due to its branding as a "simpleminded approach to their subject" the term has become unknown to college-educated students, furthering the stereotypes of "scrutiny of ancient Greek or Roman texts of a nit-picking classicist" and only the "technical research into languages and families".
Dr. Edward Morbius, one of the main characters in the science fiction film Forbidden Planet, is a philologist.
Philip, the main character of Christopher Hampton's 'bourgeois comedy' The Philanthropist, is a professor of philology in an English university town.
Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, the main character in Alexander McCall Smith's 1997 comic novel Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a philologist, educated at Cambridge.
The main character in the Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, Footnote, is a Hebrew language philologist, and a significant part of the film deals with his work.
The main character of the science fiction TV show Stargate SG-1, Dr. Daniel Jackson, is mentioned as having a PhD in philology.
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