Chapter 23 - Linguistics and Philology in Dictionaries

Summary

The terms linguistics and philology refer to different but overlapping areas of the Humanities. An opposition between them does not predate the triumph of structuralism. Structuralist linguistics devoted itself mainly to synchrony and theory, with lexicology and lexicography ending up in no-man’s land. A detailed look at dictionary definitions of linguistics and philology for more than three centuries offers a picture of the goals of both disciplines and of the ways the public understood language studies. Before the twentieth century, the focus of philology was the interpretation of old texts and word origins. The treatment of special terminology (including the terminology of linguistics) in dictionaries shows that despite all the differences a clear line between linguistics and philology cannot and need not be drawn, just as such a line cannot always be drawn between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. In the context of the present study, the use of etymology and phonetic transcription in various dictionaries illuminates the difference between and the unity of philology and linguistics.