PRESENT PROBLEMS OF ROMANCE PHILOLOGY 



BY HENRY ALFRED TODD 



[Henry Alfred Todd, Professor of Romance Philology, Columbia University, b. 

 Woodstock, Illinois, 1854. A.B. Princeton, 1876; Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1885; 

 Post-graduate Universities of Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Madrid, 1880-83; 

 Fellow Instructor and Associate, Johns Hopkins University, 1883-91; Pro- 

 fessor of Romance Languages, Leland Stanford University, 1891-93. Member 

 of Modern Language Association, American Philological Association, American 

 Oriental Society, American Dante Society, New York Academy of Sciences, 

 Membre perp&uel de la Soci&e' des Anciens Textes Francais, Paris. Author of 

 Guillame de Dole ; Pantheres d'Ammun ; Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne. Asso- 

 ciate Editor, Modern Language Notes.] 



IN undertaking to discuss, in accordance with the programme of the 

 Congress of Arts and Science, the present problems of the Romance 

 languages in their linguistic as distinguished from their literary 

 aspects, it will be proper to consider briefly at the outset the province 

 of philology in its relations on the one hand to linguistics and on 

 the other to literature. 



It is well understood that the term philology is commonly used 

 on the continent of Europe with a wider application than among 

 speakers of English. Like the history of all the other disciplines, 

 the process of adjustment between the development of the science 

 of philology and its corresponding nomenclature has been a slow and 

 somewhat tardy one. Without delaying to pass in review the various 

 learned endeavors that have been made to define the place and 

 function of philology in the domain of the humanities, some have 

 even argued that the range of philology is coextensive with this 

 broad domain, it will be sufficient here to emphasize the existence" 

 of a tendency at the present time which, so far as I am aware, 

 has not before been specifically pointed out to understand and 

 deal with philology as the mediatory science which, being con- 

 cerned at once with speech as the vehicle of human thought and 

 with literature as the embodiment of human speech, applies the data 

 of linguistics to the elucidation of literature. Thus the philologist 

 is interested in the phenomena of human speech only incidentally 

 as natural phenomena; primarily and ultimately he is concerned 

 with these phenomena as manifestations, either linguistic or literary, 

 of human thought. The scholar who investigates the sounds of the 

 human voice as physical and physiological products is a phonetician; 

 he becomes a philologist only when, as phonologist, he applies the 

 data of phonetics to the study of the historical development of the 

 sounds of human speech. Similarly, in the prosecution of distinctively 

 literary study, the work of the philologist begins precisely where the 

 process of linguistic elucidation, in its broadest sense, becomes 



