Historical) Linguistics and (Classical) Philology

The issue of the relation of historical linguistics and classical philology was raised during the nineteenth century, when, as a result of Sir William Jones' declaration for the resemblance and possible genetic relation between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Latin, and other old languages, the new science of historical and comparative linguistics began to take shape. Up until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the two fields were in a sense the two faces of the same coin, but with the Neogrammarian 'turn' linguistics managed to define in a clear way its subject matter, formulate its own distinct method, and evolve into a more or less independent and self-determined scientific field of study. The 'linguistics cum philology' approach which is suggested in the study for viewing the relation between historical linguistics and philology, classical philology in particular, is supported by a number of arguments that form the common ground of the two fields, namely etymology, textual criticism, text linguistics, poetics, the study of dialects, the decipherment of unknown scripts, the relation of linguistics and philology with other related fields such as archaeology, myth, and culture.