Where do I start with philology?
Start with the geeks
I only know what this word means because it was part of Ransom's backstory, and why he was so able to pick up the language on Malacandra
This is the best place to start: https://files.catbox.moe/c2nkyv.pdf
There's no sort of introductory book for philology as language had its own purview. As for the modern era: Medieval Studies is probably the biggest "branch", if you will, of scholars doing work in philology today. Classics also has some philological aspects to it, as will doing in studies in Classical Chinese or Classical Japanese. In Europe you might find "Philology" departments, but these are almost always either 'Linguistics' in general or perhaps 'Historical Linguistics' (which is just one aspect of philology and was never done in the more scientific manner as used to day in historical linguistics). Unfortunately the various strands that wove philology together have been torn apart into textual/literary analysis of the kind studied in literature departments, historical linguistics, and of course history. Modern academia rewards specialization and has no time for the kind of generalized knowledge that the great philologists such as Auerbach and Curtius possessed.
>>24882080For an introduction, consider James Turner's "Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities." Turner's also written a teensy bit on good books to look into as a start:https://fivebooks.com/best-books/james-turner-on-philology/You can find more in depth histories in Rudolph Pfeiffer's "History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning" and John Sandys' "A History of Classical Scholarship." Seth Benardete's "Encounters and Reflections," while not strictly on the subject, has some interesting reminiscences on some of the figures Benardete ran into on his path toward becoming a classicist. Benardete also has some interesting reflections on philology and its history in his lectures on Ovid's Metamorphoses, which you can find at the link titled "Collection Guide" at the bottom of the following.https://benardetearchive.org/dir/Here's a kind of sporadic list of interesting books and articles that might be helpful as a starting point for figuring out what you'd like to look at:Paul Maas - Textual CriticismJ.D. Denniston - The Greek Particle; Greek Prose StyleRichard Bentley - A Dissertation Upon the Epistles of PhalerisMilton Perry Brown - TheAuthentic Writings of IgnatiusJakob Filonik - Athenian Impiety Trials, a ReappraisalLeighton Durham Reynolds, Nigel Guy Wilson - Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin LiteratureAlbert Clark - The Descent of ManuscriptsJames Willis - Latin Textual CriticismJacob Wackernagel - Lectures on SyntaxThere's also the histories of Niebuhr, Mommsen, Coulanges, and Burckhardt, as examples of the kind of breadth of understanding one could gain about ancient cultures through this kind of study.
>>24884181Adding to this, you should for sure study classical languages. The best way to be a great philologist is to learn very well classical languages (no philologist now knows any latin or greek). To do that, you should start by reading and doing every exercise of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata: Familia Romana and Athenaze: an introduction to classical greek (use the Italian version if you can).
