PHILOLOGY 



4640 



PHILOLOGY 



horseshoe and stove factories and silk mills. 

 The combined monthly pay roll of all the in- 

 dustries is $400,000. 



PHILOLOGY, filol'oji, is the study of lan- 

 guage in tific manner, not merely to 

 learn its content or the correct method of using 

 it (see GKAMM.M:'. but with a view to tracing 

 its historical development and shedding light 

 on the history of the peoples among whom it 

 grew up. Philology investigates the laws gov- 

 erning tl. of all human beings of all 

 times. 



What the Word First Meant. The develop- 

 ment of the meaning of the word itself is of 

 interest. Compounded of two Greek words 

 signifying love and word, it at first denoted 

 mere "fondness for words;" that is, a philologist 

 a "talkative person." The change to the 

 present more dignified sense of love of words 

 .cry gradual. 



Growth of the Science. In its most common 

 present-day application to a comparative study 

 of related languages, with a view to discovering 

 their original connection and .their gradual di- 

 vergence, the word has been used less than a 

 century and a half; for before the latter half 

 of the eighteenth century such a thing as a 

 common stock for languages which had lost all 

 readily perceptible resemblances was unthought 

 of. It was only with the discovery of Sanskrit 

 and of its connection with Greek and Latin that 

 comparative philology began. 



After the first suggestions of the possible rela- 

 tions of languages were made, scholars of every 

 nationality took up the study; it was pursued 

 so scientifically that definite laws were discov- 

 ered according to which it was shown how va- 

 rious branches of common origin had grown 

 uway from each other. Most attention has 

 been given to the Indo-European family of 

 languages (see ARYAN), which includes San- 

 skrit, Persian, Greek, Latin and its derived ro- 

 mance languages, as well as German, English 

 and Xorse. 



Not One Original Language. The beginnings 

 of speech between human beings, so far as they 

 are known, are discussed in the article on lan- 

 guage. Early philologists in their excess of zeal 

 proceeded on the theory that there was in all 

 probability one original tongue, from which all 

 the languages of the world had been derived; 

 and they had optimistic dreams of restoring in 

 some measure that parent speech by picking 

 out the elements, or roots, which were common 

 to all languages. Deeper study revealed the 

 futility of such a hope, however, and scholars 



are to-day practically agreed that the various 

 highly-developed languages of the world are not 

 the outgrowth of a single primitive speech. Not 

 only in vocabulary, but in principles of forma- 

 tion, various languages differ so utterly that it- 

 is evident they belong to several groups, or 

 families. Within these groups, of which tin- 

 most important to Europeans and Americans 

 is the Indo-European, there are subdivisions, 

 based on the principles according to which 

 words and sentences are formed. Thus there 

 are the so-called iauhitini/ languages, of which 

 Chinese is the most conspicuous example, which 

 show a total lack of inflection; the ayijhdinn- 

 t-ive (which means running together or adhe- 

 sive), represented by Turkish, which permit of 

 the combination into one word of a number of 

 separate words, which keep their original mean- 

 ing and usually their original form; and the 

 inflectional class, in which prefixes and suffixes, 

 originally separate words, have lost their iden- 

 tity and become mere inflections. Mast of the 

 languages of Europe are of this latter class, 

 though English has shown through the centu- 

 ries a strong tendency to drop inflections and 

 make use of auxiliary words, thus establishing 

 relations, though distant, with the isolating 

 class. 



Where It Meets Popular Interest. Much that 

 has been discovered by philologists, aside from 

 the general relationships outlined above, is too 

 technical to be of interest to any save scholars. 

 In its narrower sense, however, philology pre- 

 sents word-histories which cannot fail to inter- 

 est anyone who will take the trouble to look 

 them up. 



The word lunatic, for instance, acquires new 

 meaning if its derivation from the Latin word 

 luna is known, for luna means moon, and the 

 ancients believed that lunacy was governed by 

 changes of the moon, or even caused by bright 

 moonlight. To this day many a superstitious 

 person will not sleep where the moonlight 

 strikes his head or face. 



The word tribulation shows a curious history. 

 The dictionary defines it as "a state of distress 

 or any severe affliction," and shows that it was 

 taken over bodily from the Latin; but the Latin 

 word tribulatio was derived from tribulnm, the 

 name of a sledge studded with teeth of iron or 

 stone, and used to thresh grain. Thus it means 

 literally a threshing or crunhhn/ as grain is 

 crushed. 



The word character is used in two ways which 

 at first seem totally different. It means a 

 graphic symbol of any sort, as a letter, a figure, 



