Language

What is the difference between philology and linguistics?

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Thanks for your question. Very roughly, philology is the study of words and their meanings, and the development of these two over time. This includes work deciphering "dead" languages such as Aramaic or Sumerian. By contrast, linguistics is a good deal more theoretical, aiming not just to describe, but also to explain such linguistic phenomena as morphology, phonetics, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Unlike Philology, Linguistics also aims for generalizations that hold across all languages. For a fuller discussion, you may enjoy the highly readable _Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_, edited by David Crystal.

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