PHILOLOGY. The word philology is here taken as mean ing the science of language, i.e., the study of the structure and development of languages, thus corresponding to linguistics (Fr. linguistique and Ger. Sprachwissenschaft), but differing from philology, as it is generally understood on the Continent and sometimes in England where it means literary or classical scholar ship; to the philologist in the latter sense language is one of the means to the comprehension of the whole culture of some nation, but not an object of study for its own sake, as it is to the philol ogist in the sense in which the word is here used. Though there has been, and still here and there may be, some antagonism be tween the two lines of study, they cannot properly be separated without an injurious onesidedness, as language is closely bound up with the development and expression of the whole cultural life of any nation or race.
The Chinese had, centuries before our era, elaborate dictionaries of their own language. Similarly the Assyrians compiled lists of words and syllables with grammatical explanations. But they did not penetrate so deeply into the understanding and analysis of their own language as did the early Indians, whose grammatical investigations have had a far-reaching influence on European philology, especially in the 19th century. It was occupation with the sacred hymns and notably the Rigveda that gave the chief impulse to the study : each little detail was handed down with religious fidelity and was therefore carefully examined. We find in India painstaking investigations into phonetics with a minute description of each sound and its formation ; further, precise ac counts of the changes of sounds in the inflection and formation of words. What was studied was not only the role of sounds in isolated words, but also the modification which sounds underwent when words were pronounced in connected speech (sandhi). Each word was analysed into its elements: root, affixes to form stems, and inflectional endings, and statistics were given of the occur rence of each of these elements. In this way the earliest con
tributions were given to the building up of an etymological science. Among the Indian grammarians Panini ranks first ; his work has been called "the most complete grammar existing for any lan guage, dead or living." In Greece philosophers discussed the ultimate origin of lan guage, some holding that words had come into existence by na ture, others that they were due to convention. Incidentally they indulged in the wildest etymological guesses. Aristotle gives the first beginnings of a division into parts of speech, and this was further developed by the Stoics, to whom are due those names of the different cases which in their Latin translations are still in use with us. The Alexandrians are of importance through their scholarly treatment of the old classical literature. But the horizon was bounded : no "barbarous" tongue was thought worthy of study, and therefore no true insight into the essence of language could be gained. Roman grammarians did very little beyond imitating their Greek predecessors. Nor did the middle ages produce anything worthy of mention in this brief survey.
From the 16th century onwards we find a growing number of descriptions of single languages, but very little was done for a comparative investigation of languages, except perhaps for the Semitic family. The foolish superstition, however, that all lan guages descended from Hebrew as the language spoken in the garden of Eden, gave rise to many absurd etymologies. Leibniz was one of the first to entertain saner ideas with regard to the division of languages according to their relationship; like some of his contemporaries he was also interested in the idea of a uni versal language for scientific purposes. Among valuable works of the 18th century we shall here mention only the comprehensive, but uncritical collections of words and specimens from all the then known languages; the best of them are due to Pallas (1786, 1791) and to Hervas y Panduro (1784, 1800-05) ; these were superseded by Adelung's Mithridates (1806-17). D. Jenisch's Philosophisch-kritische Vergleichung . . . von vierzehn Sprachen Europens (1796) is a comparative appraisement of languages chiefly from an aesthetic point of view and thus totally different from what we now understand by comparative philology.