Philology is knowledge on words, how they get to be spoken or written, how they happen to become human thinking matter; words in their making a natural language, in texts old and in texts new.
The Greek philos and logos have been together to tell, love of mind and language is the sense of this field of human activity. There is no requirement for a ■Sentimentalist flair: love is simply an elegant shape for a word, and minds never are fond of affective disorders. Regarding an idea ugly as a mind without natural language — love is dainty.
Matters are no different for American English, though philology is there in the USA scarce. Here is how it happens to be explained.
The “golden age of philology” lasted throughout the 19th century, or “from Giacomo Leopardi and Friedrich Schlegel to Nietzsche”. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the term philology is to describe work on languages and literatures, which had become synonymous with the practices of German scholars, was abandoned as a consequence of anti-German feeling following World War I.
Based on the harsh critique of Friedrich Nietzsche, US scholars since the 1980s have viewed philology as responsible for a narrowly scientistic study of language and literature, says Wikipedia.
I do not know any rationale for a word as “scientistic”, and facts in my philological work ■here are sure scientific enough. I cannot think about a reasonable quote for the “Anglo-Saxon world” either, and it is not only because physicists continue to make careers worldwide, despite the nuclear experience of World War Two.
When I look back, I have always wanted to be a philologist — my interest in languages began early in my childhood. I did something language every day, though it was not a task. The 1989 Poland had the opportunity, American English with the Poznan university, so I took the entrance exams and some years later, graduated.
I want to remain a philologist, and I honestly do not understand why Nazi ideas would occur about the field of study. Philology is nothing Nazi or especially German. It is in England and many other countries. ■Champollion was a philologist — and a Frenchman. I have never done anything Nazi, I have never liked Hitler, and you’d have to pay me to read Nietzsche. See the course when I studied, ■philology, curriculum.
I continue to need a spellchecker for the name Nietzsche, or I copy-paste. I do not care to remember, having looked through a few passages of his Zarathustra. The style is either lazy or otherwise incapable. Zarathustra (copy and paste) is one of those books I’d have to be paid to read. Was Nietzsche (copy and paste) truly a philologist?
I have checked briefly on his career. He became a classical philology professor at a young age, 24, and without doctorate. He was recommended as “a phenomenon” by ■Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. In the letter, ■Prussianism becomes of mention, and the motivation to promote Nietzsche might have been political as well as private. His promotion in philology was against all school rules, as he never defended his philology M.A., that is, never really graduated to become a professor.
Only a year later he left the school and joined the Prussian army. Four years later, he decided to turn to philosophy. He had his first noted nervous breakdown in 1889. Previously, he had used big amounts of opium and chloral-hydrate, having suffered from visual distortions, headaches, and indigestion since childhood. He died in 1900, after two strokes, aged 44.
His ■Übermensch might belong with some poor quality philosophy, but never with philology. Authors are people, with all the variance there is about human individuals, and philology would ask that you focus on the text or spoken language. I have never met anyone who would have Nietzsche for an influence. I was born in 1970, and celebrated my American English philology graduation with ■champagne.
On the side of mental health, the philologist advantage is that you cannot drive him or her insane with words. For other methods, other people go mad with them too, and philology cannot take the blame.
To talk about philology per se, without other pursuits, an honest lexicographer might shrug in disaffection at a theory of a universal instinct, unless the day would be bad for nonsense. The theory was coined by Tolkien, yet instinct alone is never enough, even if only to pronounce words. We may compare the word shape “czar” for a ■Russian autocrat in English [ʦɑːɹ], and a ■charm, [ʧɑ:ɹ] in Polish. Man needs knowledge.
A reliable etymologist likewise, might frown to an “ancestor” language where words for men, women, children, and houses do not even resemble the “offspring”. People have kept these word shapes throughout ages, and if there are no similarities, the languages certainly do not come one from another, or from a source in common.
Well, and word shapes happen to change in sense. We may compare the Middle English ■hate, when the day is bad for nonsense. Hasta meant a spear some time back.
To conclude, people are people. We do not go for a refund to another baker, if the local bread is too salty. We go where we got that bad bread.
Philological works should be assessed individually too, and certainly not with regard to works by people who abandoned philology and went for other things.
I do not know those methods that Wikipedia holds in contempt. My way is “to have it all check out with resources”, and this not contemptible.
It is yet all in-depth language study to be philological somehow, so if a person likes a language really, they go study philology, because there is nowhere better. Stigmatizing this pursuit with allusions to Nietzsche and Nazis is not honest.
Welcome and regards, Teresa Pelka.
Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry
The epsilon, predicate structure, vowel contour, phonemics, person reference in abstract thought, and altogether stylistic coherence, for manuscripts and print, piece-by-piece. ■More
NOTES
J. R. R. Tolkien wrote “the philological instinct” was “universal as is the use of language”; hence the “czar” here.
Wikipedia, Tolkien, J. R. R. (1923). “Philology: General Works”. The Year’s Work of English Studies. 4 (1): 36–37. ■doi:10.1093/ywes/IV.1.20.