Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics. It is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts 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.

Classical philology is the philology of Classical Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, Greek and Latin. Historically Classical philology originated principally from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the 4th century BCE, continued by Greeks and Romans throughout the Roman and Byzantine Empires, preserved and promoted during the Islamic Golden Age and eventually again taken up by European scholars of the Renaissance, where it was soon joined by philologies of other languages of non-Asian (European) (Germanic, Celtic), Eurasian (Slavistics, etc.) and Asian (Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). Indo-European studies involves the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages.