Quotes About Philology

There is no weapon like words, no armor against words, and with words the Master Philologist has conquered me. It is not at all equitable: but the man showed me a huge book wherein were the names of everything in the world, and justice was not among them. It develops that, instead, justice is merely a common noun, vaguely denoting an ethical idea of conduct proper to the circumstances, whether of individuals or communities. It is, you observe, just a grammarian's notion.

Yes, I repeat, there is always something to be done with words, and here are thirty-two authentic words from the Master Philologist himself, not to speak of three commas and a full-stop. Oh, I shall certainly go far with this.

who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception

They were quite mistaken; Dithyrambos, modern philology tells us, is the Divine Leaper, Dancer, and Lifegiver.

All this was too much for Andrew Lang (1844–1912), a folklorist and disciple of E. B. Tylor, the best-known advocate of the evolution of religion. (We shall focus more on both Lang and Tylor later.) There are two aspects to Lang's reaction to Müller: the weakness of the philological method and the claim that an evolutionary theory can give a better explanation of the content of mythology than philology.

Now didn't I warn you, just a little while ago: arithmetic leads to philology, and philology leads to crime . . .

As a writer I happen to be interested in the interrelations between two domains of intellectual activity, between two sciences, if you prefer; the interrelations between history and philology, to be specific.

Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939.

Though I may seem at times somewhat distant from you, through the gray mist of philology, I am never far, my thoughts always circle around you.

It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word.

It was also Colet who suggested to Erasmus that he fuse his two interests, the Bible and ancient literature, into one. He urged him to do for ancient Christian literature, including the New Testament, what Ficino had done for Plato: use the techniques of philology to produce a clean, definitive text free from copyists' errors and scholastic muddles, a "pure Scripture" that would show people what the Bible really said, not what tradition or the allegorists said it meant.

Over time Ficino, Colet, and their colleagues raised the art of recovering a corrupt text's lost meaning to a science, which they called philology. Cleaning up and clearing up the written works of antiquity became an Italian, and Florentine, specialty, as philology uncovered new or startling meanings in even the most familiar documents

Never should an unfamiliar word be passed over without elucidation, for, with a little conscientious research, we may each day add to our conquests in the realm of philology and become more and more ready for graceful independent expression.

It is always a sign of an unproductive time when it concerns itself with petty and technical aspects [in philology], and likewiseit is a sign of an unproductive person to pursue such trifles.

Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.

No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.

In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.

As a matter of fact, no other language in the world has received such praise as the Lithuanian language. The garlands of high honour have been taken to Lithuanian people for inventing, elaborating, and introducing the most highly developed human speech with its beautiful and clear phonology. Moreover, according to comparative philology, the Lithuanian language is best qualified to represent the primitive Aryan civilization and culture.

We must know words not as abstract grammatical and logical quantities, but as animated and social beings. Roots, inflections, word-book definitions, are products of the decomposition of speech, not speech itself. They are dead remains, stripped of their native attachments and functions, and hence it is that a living Danish scholar, himself a man of rare philological attainment and of keen linguistic perceptions, calls scholastic grammar 'the grave of language.

Part of the trouble is modern. Since the rescuing of the texts by the great philologists of the Nineteenth Century, one school after another has tried to inject its preconceptions into their meaning, according to the way in which they read the history of philosophical ideas. Part is ancient. And it begins very early. Plato, Aristotle, Eudemus, Theophrastus, Proclus, Simplicius are clearly at odds about what Parmenides may really have meant.

the line of mathematical imagination and that of philological critique seem to have faced each other in mutual incomprehension through the centuries

The study of the form is the betting man's philology, philosophy, science, and literary criticism all rolled into one.

After attending the gymnasium between my eighth and seventeenth years, I studied classical philology at Berlin University for two years under Boeckh and Lachmann, and with the friendly support of Emanuel Geibel and Franz Kugler, I dabbled in all sorts of poetry.

Sanskrita, "polished, complete." Sanskrit is the elder sister of all Indo-European tongues. Its alphabetical script is called Devanagari; literally, "divine abode." "Who knows my grammar knows God!" Panini, great philologist of ancient India, paid that tribute to the mathematical and psychological perfection of Sanskrit. He who would track language to its lair must indeed end as omniscient. 2