Language Sciences, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp.

167-175, 1997
Copyright © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd
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PIh S0388-0001(96)00057-5

L I N G U I S T I C S VS PHILOLOGY: SELF-DEFINITION OF A FIELD OR

RHETORICAL STANCE?*

KONRAD KOERNER

Introduction
When, in 1981, the organizers of the Fifth International Conference on Historical Linguistics
decided to hold a special panel discussion on 'Philology and Historical Linguistics' (see
Ahlqvist 1982:394-459, with contributions by Henning Andersen, Lyle Campbell, and many
others), most of us had long thought that the relationship between 'philology' and 'linguistics',
a contentious issue in the study of language during much of the nineteenth and the first half
of the twentieth century, had long been put ad acta. The battle, I thought, had been won in
favour of 'linguistics' as the truly scientific discipline of the two, and only weaker minds could
engage in the other field called 'philology'. The return to such an issue, then, may signal a
realignment of historical linguistics with what has traditionally been called 'philology'. At the
same time we should allow for the possibility that such a revival of interest in the question may
have something to do with certain developments in the field of diachronic linguistics, and not
necessarily indicate a return to old controversies. Indeed, we may gather from the fact that
about the same time British scholars like Rebecca Posner and John N. Green, both deeply
interested in question of historical linguistics, edited a series of monographs titled Trends in
Romance Linguistics and Philology (1980-1981, 1993). Interestingly, in the first editor's
Introduction to volume I (3-21) the relationship between 'philology' and 'linguistics' is not
even problematized; only literature and culture studies are tacitly excluded from the coverage.
Likewise, in a 1990 volume derived from a conference on the subject, Historical Linguistics
and Philology (Fisiak, 1990), it appears that only one contributor (Maficzak, 1990) picks up
the long-standing controversy, and then only for largely polemical purposes, not against
philologists of the traditional kind but, curiously enough, against Saussure's general linguistic,
notably synchronic, views and in favour of his own statistical work!
However, in order to better understand these recent trends, especially in Anglo-Saxon
countries, we must know a few things about the historical background to the traditional
relationship between 'philology' and 'linguistics' as well as the meanings associated with the
terms in different periods in the development of the study of language as a science. The
announcement of the panel discussion in 1981 in the three official languages of the Society made
it obvious to me that, while the French and German renderings of 'historical linguistics'

*Revised version of a paper presented at the XI Encontro Nacional da ANPOLL (Associa~:io de P6s-Gradua~io e
Pesquisa em Letras e Lingiifstica), Jo~o Pessoa, Para~a, Brazil, 2 - 6 June 1996. A translation into Portuguese of an
earlier, much shorter version by Cristina Altman and Lineid¢ do Lago Salvador Mosca (both of the University of Sio
Paulo), ~Lingiifstica e Filologia: O eterno debate', is to appear in Filologia e Lingafstica Portuguesa 1: 1 (Sio Paulo,
Fall 1996).
Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Dr E. F. Konrad Koerner, Professor of General
Linguistics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada, KIN 6N5 (Email: koerner@uottawa.ca).

167
168 KONRAD KOERNER

as 'linguistique historique' and 'historische Sprachwissenschaft' seem unproblematical, the

suggested German and French counterparts to the English term 'philology' do not traditionally
cover the same ground. Bloomfield (1933: 512, note 2.1.) noted the following, which may be
taken as paradigmatic of linguists' attitudes for much of the twentieth century:
The term philology, in British and in older American usage, is applied not only to the study of culture (especially
through literary documents), but also to linguistics. It is important to distinguish between philology (German
Philologie, French philologie) and linguistics (German Sprachwissenschafi, French linguistique), since the two
studies have little in common.
Bloomfield refers to statements made by Holger Pedersen (1867-1953) in Litteris 5.150
(1928), and by George Melville Boiling (1871-1963) in Language 5 (1929), on the confusion
in English usage. In French, for instance, in contrast to 'philologie' tout court, the collocation
'philologie compar6e' was the usual term to refer to historical-comparative linguistics, in the
nineteenth century as well as during the first half of the twentieth century. Compare the journal
Revue de Linguistique et de Philologie compar~e (Paris, 1867-1916), which not only made the
distinction but also followed largely Schleicher's conception of linguistic science; this is
particularly evident in the contributions by Abel Hovelacque (1843-1896), Honor6 Chavez
(1815-1877), and several other scholars. Interestingly enough, the editor of the Revue de
Philologie (Paris, 1877-1926), Edouard Tournier (1831-1899), took a very similar dichotomist
position, thus motivating Michel Br6al (1832-1915) to oppose the ' s6paration f~cheuse' (Br6al
1878:1) between linguistique and philologie.
As we know, the original meaning of 'philologia' in all three languages was 'love of learning
and literature', a sense which seems still to be present in all Western cultures. Both French
and German have retained much of the original meaning of the term, together with the more
specialized meaning of 'the study of literary texts'. However, much of the English usage has
become associated with 'the historical study of texts', to the extent that it has been traditionally
used in the sense of 'historical-comparative linguistics', something which had come, in
German-speaking lands at least, to be called first 'Sprachvergleichung' (language comparison),
then 'Sprachwissenschaft' (linguistics) tout court, especially during the last quarter of the
nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century.
In the following I will sketch part of the sources of the philology/linguistics debate and, at
the same time, hint at some of the reasons for certain terminological differences in tradi-
tional Anglo-Saxon and continental European usages. We might remind ourselves that every
discipline striving for an autonomous status has to develop its particular metalanguage, its
special terminological kit, and that the study of language has gone through phases of develop-
ment which could be paralleled by developments in other fields (cf. Koerner, 1980).

The early nineteenth century

Linguistics in the way we have come to understand the subject has developed during the past
century; its beginnings are not as easy to pinpoint as most of our textbooks in the history of
linguistics suggest. 2 However, if the development of a number of technical terms is any
guide, we may trace its inception back to the first decade of the nineteenth century. In 1803
the term 'vergleichende Grammatik' (comparative grammar), probably by analogy to 'com-
parative anatomy', was first used by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845). By 1808 the term
'Linguistik' appeared as part of a short-lived periodical (though it had probably been used
earlier), 3 and several years before Thomas Young is said to have coined the term 'Indo-
European' (in 1813), the compound 'indogermanique', introduced by the Danish-born French
geologist Conrad Malte-Brun in 1810, had been in use (cf. Shapiro, 1981). Other terms and
 THE PHILOLOGY/LINGUISTICS CONTROVERSY 169

concepts were developed soon thereafter (cf. Koerner, 1980, for details), but the three men-
tioned are of particular interest in the present discussion.
The coinage of new terminology suggests a desire to establish a new field of study; it does
not necessarily mean that these neologisms in fact produce the field as an autonomous discipline
at once. In fact, it took the joint efforts of two generations of researchers to establish the study
of language on firm grounds. Although there are indications that the first generation of
historical or historical-comparative linguists (e.g. Bopp, Rask, Grimm, and others) realized
that they were moving in directions that separated them from much of the literature-oriented
philological tradition, they made no attempt to divorce themselves from it openly. Indeed, while
perhaps extending the usual meaning of the term, they regarded themselves as 'philologists'.
As a result, although the term 'Sprachwissenschaft' had been available to these scholars from
the beginning, they do not seem to have made significant--and hardly ever polemical--use of
it. Jacob Grimm, for one, was quite satisfied in simply calling his historical linguistic work
neue Philologie (new philology).
August Friedrich Pott (1802-1887), a former pupil of Bopp and a great admirer of Humboldt
(who lived long enough to see his lifework eclipsed by two subsequent generations of linguists,
first by Curtius and Schleicher, then by the Neogrammarians), did not make much use of
the term 'Sprachwissenschaft'. Instead, he used expressions such as 'Sprachforschung' or
'Sprachkunde' in his writings (and 'Sprachlehre' for 'grammar'). It seems that he began using
the term more regularly from the mid-1840s onwards after having associated himself strongly
with Albert Hoefer's (1812-1883) Zeitschrift far die Wissenscha3~ der Sprache (4 vols,
1846-1853), which was soon eclipsed by Adalbert Kuhn's (1812-1881) Zeitschrift far
vergleichende Sprachforschung (1852ff.), a journal which still exists today. 4 Hoefer, like
Pott, was interested in promoting a more general, Humboldtian approach to language, some-
thing which was not taken up by the majority of the more positivist linguists of the second half
of the nineteenth century. 5 Hoefer, it seems, expressed himself in vain in favour of an all-
encompassing kind of 'Sprachforschung', when he explained himself as follows concerning the
scope and general philosophy of his Zeitschrifi:
Es mag nicht iiberfliissig sein, ausdriicklich hinzuzufugen, dass uns Forscher jeder Sprache willkommen sind,
und dass wir uns so wenig auf die neuere Wissenschafi tier Sprachvergleichung beschriinken werden, class wir,
iiberzeugt yon der Unzul~inglichkeit einer ausschliesslichen Methode, unsere Zeitschrift vielmehr als ein Organ
zur Vermittelung und VersShnung der verschiedensten Richtungen anbieten.
[It may appear superfluous to add expressly that we welcome researchers of any language, and that we are
limiting ourselves to the new science of language comparison so little that, convinced of the insufficiency of
an exclusive method, we instead offer our journal as an organ for the mediation and reconciliation of the most
divergent trends. ]

Because of his stand on the 'divergent trends' in the science of language, it is not surprising
that Hoefer expresses himself in favour of a collaboration between 'classische Philologen'
and 'Indogermanisten' in the subsequent paragraph of his editorial. In so doing Hoefer
found himself in line with many of the elder statesmen of the discipline as well as with the
somewhat younger Georg Curtius (1820-1885). Curtius, realizing a potential collision course
between the diverging approaches to the study of language, published a monograph in 1845,
at age 25, in which he tried to demonstrate the usefulness of 'Sprachwissenschaft' (i.e.
historical-comparative grammar) to classical philology. Indeed, Curtius spent his life on the
reconciliation between the two fields, as is evident from his many programmatic statements,
the publication of grammars of Greek and Latin, the creation of journals (e.g. Studien zur
griechischen und iateinischen Grammatik, Laipzig, 1868-1877), etc. It appears that Curtius'
allegiance to 'philology', the more traditional outlook on language, and his general philosophy
170 KONRAD KOERNER

of linguistic science removed him more and more from the advances in linguistics made
during the 1870s and 1880s (cf. Wilbur 1977, for a penetrating analysis and a documentation
of the period in question). Toward the end of his life he essentially disavowed his former
students.
Quite in contrast to Curtius, his close contemporary and long-time friend August Schleicher
(1821-1868) took a very different stand. In fact Arbuckle (1970:18) regards Schleicher as
responsible for the 'gratuitous' distinction between 'linguistics' and 'philology'. We have by
now arrived at the middle of the nineteenth century.

The mid-nineteenth century: Schleicher

It is by now generally agreed that Schleicher was the most influential mid-nineteenth-century
theorist of language. In fact there are good reasons to believe that the neogrammarian doc-
trine is by and large little more than the extension of Schleicher's teachings (cf. Koerner,
1981, for details). From 1850 onwards--el, his Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer
Uebersicht--Schleicher argued strongly in favour of a sharp distinction (and division of labour)
between linguistics (he later preferred the term 'Glottik '6 to mean 'linguistic science') and
'Philologie'.
For Schleicher, 'Philologie' is an 'historical discipline'; it regards language as a medium for
investigating the thought and cultural life of a people. By contrast, 'Linguistik'--and it appears
here that the term is used quite forcefully, if not polemically--is a field that concerns itself 'with
the natural history of man'. Indeed, linguistics (in Schleicher's understanding of the discipline)
is a natural science, both because its object of investigation is open to direct observation and
because language is outside the realm of the free will of the individual. In Schleicher's view,
language is subject to unalterable, natural laws (hence: Lautgesetze). He states that this applies
especially to 'Formenlehre' (Schleicher introduced the term 'Morphologie' into linguistic
nomenclature only in 1858), and much less to the realm of syntax and still less where stylistics
is concerned (Schleicher, 1850:4).
Whereas 'Philoiogie' has to do with 'Kritik', with individual interpretations of (largely)
historical texts, 'Linguistik' (note that Schleicher does not use the then much more common
term 'Sprachwissenschaft' here) is at its best when it has to do with languages such as
Amerindian languages which have no written tradition. Schleicher agrees that the linguist,
especially where the classical languages which are no longer spoken are concerned, needs
philology as an ancillary discipline from time to time, and also that philology requires linguistic
information on occasion. However, essentially we have to do with two distinct objects of
investigation, to the extent that a linguist need not be a philologist after all. In contrast to a
philologist, who could work on the basis of the knowledge of only one language (e.g. Greek),
a linguist, in Schleicher's view (1850:4) needs to know many languages, to the extent that
'Linguistik' becomes synonymous with 'Sprachvergleichung' (p.5).
It is clear from Schleicher's introductory chapter, 'Linguistik und Philologie', to his 1850
book that there was a polemical intent behind his argument; he was concerned with establishing
linguistics as an autonomous discipline, and not simply an appendix to classical philology,
literature or merely the study of Sanskrit (which was traditionally more closely connected with
philosophy, theology and general culture than with the study of language per se). In his
subsequent writings Schleicher continued to emphasize the dichotomy between 'philology' and
'linguistics', and linguistic science has ever since made such a clear distinction (cf. the
quotation from Bloomfield cited above as a typical example).
 THE PHILOLOGY/LINGUISTICS CONTROVERSY 171

Linguistics after Schleicher

At least with respect to historical-comparative linguistic method we have remained within the
framework largely established by Schleicher. It was to a great extent owing to his work that
'linguistic science' (this term was made popular in the Anglo-Saxon world by Max Miiller in
the 1860s) became a professionalized discipline soon after his death, with professorships in the
individual branches of the Indo-European language family being created at many universities
in Central Europe (e.g. a chair for Slavic at Leipzig in 1870, with August Leslden as the first
incumbent, ~ a chair in Germanic at Jena in 1876 for Eduard Sievers, etc.). 8 Schleicher's
influence may also be seen in the manner in which later generations of linguists have viewed
philology in contrast to linguistics.
It therefore seems strange to us that Berthold Delbrtick in his 1880 Einleitung in das
Sprachstudium (cf. Delbrtick 1882:55) presents Schleicher 'in the essence of his being' as a
philologist, since thirty years before it had been Schleicher (and no one else) who had clearly
set off his work from those of the (classical) philologists. However, if one remembers the
'eclipsing stance' which the Young Turks at the University of Leipzig and elsewhere in
Germany took vis-gl-vis their elders from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, one might not be
surprised that Delbrtick (1842-1922) distorted the facts to suit his argument, namely, that the
junggrammatische Richtung represented 'new endeavours' (Delbriick 1882:55ff.) rather than
a continuation of research along established lines. Already by 1885, when it was obvious that
the 'war of monographs' (Jankowsky) which Curtius and other scholars of his generation had
fought against their followers was lost, Karl Brugmann (1849-1919) struck a different chord.
In his Antrittworlesung as first incumbent of the chair of 'vergleichende Sprachwissenschafi'
at the University of Freiburg, "Sprachwissenschaft und Philologie" (Brugmann 1885:1-41),
Brugmann put forward the view that the two fields are complementary rather than in opposition
to each other (p.7ff.). In fact he went so far to assert (p. 17):
In der That hat denn auch noch niemand [ ! ] eine begriffiiche Grenze zwischen Linguistik und Philologie zu
ziehen gewusst, deren Unhaltbarkeit sich nicht leicht darthun liesse. [ . . . ] Nicht in den Sachen liegt eine
Discrepanz, erst der Mensch, der einseitig urtheilende, tr/igt sie hinein.
[Indeed, until now nobody [!] has been able to draw a conceptual line between linguistics and philology, whose
untenability could be proved easily [ . . . ]. The discrepancy is not to be found in the subjects themselves but
it is the human being, judging one-sidedly, who carries it in [to the discussion]. ]
Brugmann offers an historical explanation for the making of the distinction between the two
areas of investigation, namely, that it should be explained "aus dem Entwicklungsgange, den
die wissenschafiliche Forschung genommen hat [out of the evolution that scientific research
has gone through]". In other words, that it had been important at some point in time in the
development of linguistic science to draw such a distinction (probably to assert its identity).
By 1885 Brugmann feels no need to maintain the separation of the two fields but makes a
plea in favour of their close collaboration. By that time however linguistics had become an
autonomous discipline and was in no need to defend itself against encroachments from adjacent
fields, with the result that we find few discussions of the relationship between philology and
linguistics from that time onwards until the late 1960s, when new battles were fought in
linguistics.

Modern variants of the philology/linguistics debate

As we may have gathered from the quotation from Bloomfield's Language made at the outset
of the paper, the rapport between philology and linguistics has become a non-issue in linguistic
science. (Note that the question had been taken from a footnote, not a general statement made
LSC 19/2-C
172 KONRAD KOERNER

in the regular text of the book.) Indeed, there are indications that with the particular develop-
ments in linguistics following the appearance of the Saussurean Cours de linguistique g~n~rale
and the pride of place which 'la linguistique synchronique' began to take in the work of many
schools of linguistic thought from the 1920s onwards, the debate was soon centered around
the relationship between 'traditional', i.e. historical-comparative (Indo-European), linguistics
(Saussure's 'linguistique diachronique') and 'synchronic', 'descriptive', or 'structural' ling-
uistics, an approach to language analysis that abstracts away from the time factor and regards
a given language as a network of systematic relationships between parts making up a whole.
Many countries, especially those with a long-standing tradition of Indo-European historical-
comparative work, such as the German-speaking lands and Italy (but also France and other
countries to some extent), did not wholeheartedly accept 'synchronic linguistics' before the
mid-1960s, a time when in North America younger linguists distinguished their field from those
of their predecessors as being 'merely structuralist', 'taxonomic' and, worse, 'uninteresting'.
Their (likewise non-historical) approach to linguistic analysis was called 'transformational'
and, in order to lay emphasis on what was claimed to be a 'creative' understanding of language,
'generative', although it is evident that their work can well be described as 'structural' too.
(The interest of the transformational-generative grammarians in historical linguistics has
remained, with fairly few exceptions, marginal, despite Chomsky's repeated affirmations that
he derived his inspiration for transformational rules from historical linguistics.)
As a result of the visibly polemic attempt of the younger generation of structural linguists
to separate their endeavours from those of their immediate predecessors--a phenomenon which
we find best illustrated in the battle of the Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) against their
teachers, especially Curtius and Schleicher, more than 100 years ago--it seems that certain
linguists (some of them with philological leanings) felt that the relationship between 'linguistics'
and 'philology' should be debated again.
While Arbuckle (1970) regarded the distinction as 'gratuitous', others have taken a quite
different view of the matter. Jankowsky (1973), under the influence of the traditional Anglo-
Saxon meaning of 'philology', suggests a tripartite distinction, namely, one between 'Philologie',
'Linguistik', and 'Literaturwissenschaft'. This separates the study of literature from philology,
something which is frequently found in German-speaking lands where 'philology' stands either
for 'classical philology' or for 'language and literature of a particular tongue'.
Anttila (1973), being foremost an historical linguist (though he has never neglected general
theoretical questions), seeks to reconcile the traditional dichotomy, making a plea in favour of
a stronger philological orientation of linguistics. Linguists should know languages after all--not
only their mother tongue (and this even imperfectly). In the same volume in which Anttila's
contribution appeared, however, the editors, Bartsch and Vennemann, proposed quite a dif-
ferent dichotomy, and here again we are back to a polemical type of argument similar to
what we first encountered in Schleicher (1850), though now under a changed situation in the
development of linguistics.
Bartsch and Vennemann (1973a) use the co-existing (and usually synonymous) terms in
German, namely, 'Linguistik' and 'Sprachwissenschaft', in order to support their argument in
favour of the following 'new speak': while 'Sprachwissenschaft' is the overall term (including
synchronic as well as diachronic linguistic research), 'Linguistik' should represent the essen-
tially theoretical portion of the science of language.
This proposal was not an isolated one but an expression of the 'new faith' on the part of a
number of other linguists of the same generation who felt a need to distinguish their work from
that of their predecessors and differently-minded colleagues. 'Sprachwissenschaft' in the
 THE PHILOLOGY/LINGUISTICS CONTROVERSY 173

German-speaking lands (as glottologia in Italy for example) stood for an antiquated view
of language incompatible with present-day 'discoveries' about the nature of language (cf.
Newmeyer 1980, for an expression of this 'modern' view), whereas 'Linguistik' (in Italy:
linguistica)--usually equated with 'linguistic theory' in 'mainstream' linguistics--suggests the
newly achieved scientific vistas of the new generation of researchers in the study of language. 9
Hildebrandt (1975) is just another example of the polemics between 'linguistics' (Sprach-
wissenschaft) and 'modern linguistics' (Linguistik) that was quite typical of the 1970s, both in
North America and in Europe.
The heavy polemics in certain quarters notwithstanding, there were other voices in the debate
who felt that the structuralist/transformationalist and related controversies did little more than
disguise the much more fundamental issues, namely, the (redefined) relationship between
'linguistics' and 'philology' (cf. Hofmann 1973), and the extent to which linguistics can profit
from philological work (cf. Anttila 1973).

Concluding remarks
The exchanges between scholars participating in the Galway, Ireland, 1981 panel on 'Philology
and Historical Linguistics' made it clear that there was a general consensus on the desirability
of those interested in doing research on matters concerning language change to be familiar with
philological practice. Indeed, without a properly prepared philological base such research
would not serve much the advancement of knowledge. The long-standing preoccupation on the
part of generativists with theory, at the cost of a healthy respect for data, explains why they
have contributed so little to 'an inquiry into the mechanism and causes of the still puzzling
phenomenon of language change' (thus Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle in their joint
preface to Cartesian Linguistics, p. x) since it was first announced as a desideratum in 1966.
(Philological practice insofar as it does not refer to language but to the analysis of texts for
literary or other non-linguistic purposes is, of course, a different matter and does not concern
us here.)
However, it seems that the issue is not quite dead yet, and may never be. As Richard Hogg
has reminded us recently, there will be different ways of dividing up the turf, and different
scholars in the language sciences may take different positions. For Hogg (1994:3) it's clear that
the crucial difference between the two is 'that a linguistic approach is theory-oriented, whilst
a philological approach is data-oriented' and, as he demonstrates in his analysis of varying
approaches to Old English, shortcomings can be found among the exponents of both positions.
We may therefore conclude that linguistics, notably historical linguistics, could indeed profit
from the gegenseitige Erhellung der Gegenstdnde, the reciprocal illumination of the objects of
investigation. So while I doubt many would follow Hogg's characterization of the two fields
in these 'facile' terms, I fail to see (pace J~iger 1987) that their relationship needs to be a
troubled one.

NOTES
~More theoretically or philosophically inclined and not exclusively Indo-European oriented endeavours were
subsumed under the term 'allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft'.
2The beginning of linguistics as a science is traditionally associated with the publication of Bopp's Conjugationssystem
(1816), a date which appears to have been reinforced by the decision of the editors to publish the Cours exactly 100
years later (Lausanne & Paris; Payot, 1916--not 'Geneva, 1915' as one still finds in the literature).
It would however not be correct to argue that linguistics did not begin before 1808, the year in which the term
'Linguistik' appears to have been used for the first time in the sense of 'science of language', namely, by Johann
174 KONRAD KOERNER

Severin Vater (1771-1826), the theologian, librarian, and linguist, in the short-lived (and apparently very rare)
Allgemeines Archivfar Ethnographie und Linguistik edited by him together with the publisher and philologist Friedrich
Justin Bertuch (1747-1822) at the latter's Landes-Industrie-Comptoir in Weimar in 1808. However, as a compound,
the term appeared 20 years earlier already, in Christian Jacob Kraus's (1753-1807) famous review of P. S. Pallas's
Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa, vol. I (St. Petersburg, 1787) in AUgemeine Literatur-Zeitung Nos.
235-237 (Oct. 1787), where he speaks on several occasions in favour of the establishment of a Universal-Linguistik.
We could therefore assume that the simplex Linguistik had been around for some time by then (cf. Moldenhauer, 1957
for earlier uses of the term).
4Since volume 100 (1988) rechristened Historische Sprachforschung/Historical Linguistics, thus signalling a
widening of the scope of the journal, if not a turn in direction away from traditional historical-comparative Indo-
European linguistics, possibly more in line with the coverage in Diachronica: International journal for historical
linguistics (1984-).
~Friedrich Techmer's (1843-1891) lnternationale Zeitschrififur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschafi (Leipzig, later on
Heilbronn, 1884-1890; repr., with a foreword by E. F. K. Koerner, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1973) hardly fared
better. Following his death there was nobody around to step in and continue the journal. Indeed, history appears to
have been repeating itself when we note that another general linguistics journal (with a broad Humboldtian outlook
on language), Lexis, barely survived for four volumes (1948-1952).
6'GIottik', being (unlike 'Linguistik') entirely Greek-derived and similar in structure to 'Botanik', 'Physik', and
'Mathematik', was naturally much more appealing to Schleicher than any other term, including 'Sprachwissenschafi'.
Interestingly, Schleicher's term was still alive and well in Brazilian linguistics during the 1950s; cf. for instance the
Dictiondrio defilologia e gramdtica (Rio de Janeiru: Casa de Rui Barbosa, 1956; 2nd ed., 1964) by Joaquim Mattoso
C~mara, Jr. (1904-1970), which offers Gldtica and Glotologia as 'termos equivalentes' to Lingil[stica (p. 216).
7It should perhaps be remembered that Leskien (1840-1916), the acknowledged leader of the Junggrammatiker, was,
like Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), Johannes Schmidt (1843-1901), Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), a
former pupil of Schleicher's.
SThese chairs were called then and more often than not still today 'Lehrstuhl for slavische Philologie', 'Lehrstuhl fOr
deutsche Philologie', etc.
91nterestingly, from the point of view of philologists, lingalstica or glotologia could be regarded as "uma ci6ncia
puramente especulativa" in contrast to the much more 'practical'filologia--cf. Gladstone Chaves de Melo (b. 1917),
lnicia#~o ~ filologia portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Organizaqfes Sim6es, 1951), pp. 24-25.

REFERENCESt
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tThe bibliography includes several items not referred to in this paper, whose subject in effect could be enlarged to
monograph length in order to provide a full account of the history of the linguistics vs philology debate and, among
other things, the general hostility towards linguists that existed among most classical philologists during much of the
nineteenth century, and the manner in which it affected the careers of a number of Indo-Europeanists of the time, not
only the career of August Schleicher at .lena.
 THE PHILOLOGY/LINGUISTICS CONTROVERSY 175

Curtius, G. (1862) Philologie und Sprachwissenschaft: Antrittworlesung gehalten zu Leipzig am 30. April 1862.
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Gunter Narr, Tiibingen.
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A problem in linguistic historiography. Folia Linguistica Historica 2, 157-187. (Repr. in Koerner, 1989: 325-376.)
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405-414. (Repr. in Koerner, 1989: 233-244.)
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Mariczak, W. (1990) The Object of Philology and the Object of Linguistics. Fisiak 1990: 261-272.
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(Appended is a note (pp. 440-444) by Otto Basler, 'El grupo Linguist-Linguistik-linguistisch en alemlin'.)
Newmeyer, F. J. (1980) Linguistic Theory in America: The First Quarter-Century of Transformational Grammar.
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Posner, R. and Green, J. N. (Eds) (1993) Trends in Romance: Linguistics and Philology. Vol. V: Bilingualism and
Linguistic Conflict in Romance. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.
Reid, T. B. W. (1956) Linguistics, structuralism and philology. Archivum l_anguisticum 8, 28-37.
Reid, T. B. W. (1960) Historical Philology and Linguistic Science: An inaugural lecture. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Robinett, B. W., Hall, R. A. Jr, Kurath, H., Hoenigswald, H. M., Smith, H. L. Jr, Twaddell, W. F. and Fries, C. C.
(1952-1953) Classics and Linguistics. Classical Weekly 46, 97-100.
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Schleicher, A. (1850) Linguistik und Philologie. Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht. K6nig, Bonn.
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White, D. S. (1953-1954) Classics and linguistics. Classical Weekly 47, 42-43. (Reply to Robinett et al., 1952-53.)
Wilbur, T. H. (1977) The Lautgesetz-Controversy: A documentation. With essays by G. Curtius, B. Delbriick,
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