Study of Language

from Babel to Comparative Philology

The philology is the study of languages in written historical sources to know how languages or words develop, and establish their historical relatedness. “In the very beginnings of recorded history we find explanations of the diversity of tongues, and naturally such explanations resort to supernatural intervention. The "law of wills and causes," formulated by Comte, is exemplified here as in so many other cases. That law is, that when men do not know the natural causes of things, they simply attribute them to wills like their own; thus they obtain a theory which provisionally takes the place of science, and this theory is very generally theological...”