page_title: Philology
section_title: Comparative
hierarchical_section_title: Philology / Branches / Comparative
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of Indo-European philology historical and comparative 1969.
context_page_description: Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics. Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist.
  In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics.
  Classical philology studies classical languages. Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BCE, continued by Greeks and Romans throughout the Roman/Byzantine Empire. It was preserved and promoted during the Islamic Golden Age, and eventually resumed by European scholars of the Renaissance, where it was soon joined by philologies of other non-Asian, Eurasian, Asian, and African languages. Indo-European studies involves the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages.
context_section_description: The comparative linguistics branch of philology studies the relationship between languages. Similarities between Sanskrit and European languages were first noted in the early 16th century and led to speculation of a common ancestor language from which all these descended. It is now named Proto-Indo-European. Philology's interest in ancient languages led to the study of what were, in the 18th century, "exotic" languages, for the light they could cast on problems in understanding and deciphering the origins of older texts.
caption: Cover of Indo-European Philology: Historical and Comparative by William Burley Lockwood (1969)
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