Comparative and Historical method

Special Philology, its Subject and tasks

Special philology (Greek phileo, logos) is one of the subjects which establishes the back-ground of a specialist in philology. It used to be understood as a science studying all types of not only texts but also material remnants. Philology as a science appeared in antiquity in order to explain old texts, later its tasks and notions have been changed.

Now it is defined as a common name of subjects studying languages, literatures, and culture with the help of texts of literature, history etc.

Our branch of special philology is Germanic philology because the English language is a representative of the Germanic group of the Indo-European family of languages.

The SUBJECT MATTER of Germanic philology:

l it studies the languages of the Germanic group:

l their origin, development and structure,

l mutual connections, common laws,

l tendencies of development

l interconnections with the languages of other groups.

Its main tasks are to explain modern state of Germanic languages and to reconstruct their ancient forms. Modern state can’t be explained without studying ancient situation.

Special philology is connected with other sciences:

l general linguistics,

l comparative linguistics,

l dialects, linguistic geography;

l history, archaeology, ethnography,

l history of art, religion etc.

It is divided into German philology, English, Scandinavian etc. It gives the basis to study the history of the language, theoretical grammar, lexicology etc.

Вопрос 2

Comparative and Historical method

Linguistics uses various methods to study languages: descriptive, statistic, experimental etc. One of them is Comparative and historical method.

This is a scientific way of reconstruction of those language phenomena of the past, which were not fixed in written texts.

The reconstruction can be effected by means of comparing later facts of two or more languages which are known either from written texts or real speech. Sometimes only it works in studying language phenomena.

Steps of the process of comparing language phenomena

l 1) to compare sounds and morphemes;

l 2) to establish common laws;

l 3) to establish chronological correspondences among them,

l 4) to reconstruct a primary form.

The method is not ideal, it has some drawbacks

l it can’t give the exact dates of this or that language change;

l it doesn’t explain several phenomena;

l it’s not suitable for all types of languages.

The usage of this method allowed to define the place of Germanic languages among other languages of the world, to trace historic changes in their phonetics, grammar and vocabulary, to explain important phenomena of their modern state.

This method is based on the following principles

l Genetic commonness of the compared units.

l Comparison of the meaningful units (not simply sounds);

l Regularity of correspondences;

l Phonetic laws;

l Semantic laws.

Various scientists who developed this method are William Jones (1746 – 1794) who began studying Sanskrit; Franz Bopp (1791 – 1867) - the founder of the method itself, who compared Indo-European languages; Rasmus Rask Christian(1787-1832) who used this method to study Germanic languages; A.Vostokov, an investigator of Slavonic languages (1781-1864); Jakob Grimm, the author of the first comparative grammar of Germanic languages (1785-1868); Karl Verner, an investigator of Germanic phonetics(1846-1896); F. de Saussure, Antoine Meillet and many others.

Вопрос 3

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