Philology

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 together have been to tell, love of mind and language. There is no requirement for a ■Sentimentalist flair: ■love is an elegant shape of a word, and ■minds never are fond of affective disorders. Regarding an idea ugly as a mind without natural language — love is dainty.

History has known ideas pretty and ideas scruffy, the key concept to have been a ■rim. Philosophy, politics, and war thrown into one goblet, here comes ■Friedrich Nietzsche. Another cup — politics, fable, and war amalgamate into the bubbly tales by ■J.R.R. Tolkien. It would have been a simple tumbler, for colonial politics and the Proto-Indo-European theory by ■William Jones, neither stem nor foot, for a man, woman, child, or a house.

Feel welcome to read:
■No man, woman, child, or house, with the PIE.

The mixtures did not turn out as agreeable as the idea for the American ■melting pot, and philology got worse than adulterated. Well, not on own ground, as even bias confirms. Here we have Wikipedia on ■Philology:
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 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.

I do not know any rationale for a word as “scientistic”, and ■the facts for my graduation thesis are sure hard enough. I cannot think about a reasonable quote for the “Anglo-Saxon world” either, and it is not only because physics continues to give careers, despite the nuclear experience of World War II. Feel welcome to view ■my curriculum: good jobs as well, and I have my teacher qualification cert.

My language interests began in my early childhood. Free of politics, free of anything non-language: unadulterated, I could say. I just loved languages and dictionaries. My first “brush off” was with English, Latin, and Greek, for languages different from my native yet not inborn Polish, before I went to primary school.

I know it’s wunderkind stuff to some people with statistics, but really, I was just a kindergartner. My father studied history before he met my mother, and I could use the books in the home library. Curious about Greek in a glossary of Aristotle with PWN, I made silent forms as hην, mixed alphabet there is no known language to pronounce, just to play with ideas. My Polish never suffered with this. I remained top of the class also in high school.

I have never “summed up” on my languages, and I want to keep it an open matter. I still do things as ■here or there, and my word maps are not anything fixed; they are for skilled behavior, where we people are sometimes like this, and sometimes like that. My ambition is to make a ■lexicon.

All in all, ideology, Nietzsche or Nazis never crossed my mind for language. I have never read any work by Nietzsche, and I continue to need a spellchecker for the name: it must be I do not care to remember, having looked through a few passages of his ■Zarathustra: I disliked the style as well as intellectually lazy manner — one of those books I’d have to be paid to read.

I have looked up Nietzsche’s career. He became a classical philology professor at a very young age, 24, without doctorate, the story is, whereas he didn’t even have a teaching degree, and was given the chair as “a phenomenon” by ■Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. Without a special tendre, but ■Prussianism became of mention in the recommending letter, and the motivation to promote Nietzsche might have been political as well as sexual: the promotion was absolutely against any rules for schools.

Nietzsche never got his teaching degree, and whenever I’d browse any of his writing, I’d come across no teaching merit. “Ambitious people secretly or openly resent being loved”, he rambles I guess, for the proper verb to get along with his ideas on ■love and honor; and he totes up on facing pages, with his ■”desire for sore affliction”, image at the link. Nietzsche maybe was sexually odd with regard to physical pain; his tote remarks: “no woman could understand this”, and I do not try.

I do not need and do not acknowledge him with my field, ■neophilology to be exact, and there is no known authority to aver the world would be ugly, had a world begun with Old English.

Nietzsche would forbid ambition to people. For interesting things to perceive in own mind and head of course, you could be “rolling the landscape” or reading / writing a good book (some take a train). Only a year after his “philology feat”, Nietzsche went rolling with the Prussian army. Four years later, he decided to change to philosophy. In 1889 he had his first noted mental breakdown, having been a heavy user of opium and chloral-hydrate. He couldn’t have been a good linguist, with such intake. Linguistics requires clarity of mind. It does not work otherwise.

His philosophy to say, “The earth has a skin, and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man” — is as a standalone railroad car near a town marketplace they have traffic lights: the car is obviously a wrong place in an unusual setting, and it is not going anywhere; it can neither give nor take a clue, and well, someone is going to have to remove that strange thing, be there place for thought.

Since childhood, Nietzsche had suffered from visual distortions, headaches, and indigestion. He died in 1900, after two strokes, aged 44.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch is his philosophy. It never could be philology. ■Champollion never looked to skin color to interpret ■the Rosetta Stone, and I have never met anyone to hold Nietzsche for any influence. I was born in 1970 and celebrated my American English philology graduation with ■Champagne, real French. Good taste.

On the side of mental health, the philologist advantage is that you cannot drive him or her insane with words. He or she knows how language works too well. As for other methods, other people go mad with them too, and philology cannot take the blame either.

To talk about philology per se, without other pursuits that is, an honest lexicographer might shrug in disaffection to a theory as a universal instinct in language, unless the day would be bad for nonsense and the reaction broader. Instinct alone is never enough, even if only to pronounce words. We may compare the word shape “czar”, for a ■Russian autocrat in English, and for a ■charm in Polish. Autocrats are no charm.

Likewise, a reliable etymologist 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 for word shapes to have changed in reference, we may compare the Middle English ■hate, when the day is bad for nonsense.

To conclude, people are people. We do not ask another baker for a refund, if your local bread is too salty. Philological works should be assessed individually as well.

I do not know what those German philologist methods would have been for Wikipedia to hold in contempt. The manner I have been familiar with is “to make it all check out”, to verify my written matter with linguistic resources, that is. The reader’s mind needs to be in the reader’s head anyway. A philologist may also create own resources, or express own opinion, which they mark then with own name, given and second.
Regards, Teresa Pelka.

Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Poems
Life | Love | Nature | Time and Eternity

NOTE
J. R. R. Tolkien wrote “the philological instinct” was “universal as is the use of language”. ■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.

■This text is also available in Polish.

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