Is Philology pointless?
Philology, or the study of the history of language, was once thought of as the key to all sorts of otherwise lost knowledge. In the 19th century it was thought that by working out the relationship between different languages, deducing the rules that governed the gradual sound changes that turned one language into another and by looking at the vocabulary of languages and how meanings changed we would be able to uncover some of the lost history of pre-literate societies. To some extent this happened. Painstaking comparison of different languages established the existence of the Indo-European and other families of related language. English belongs to the Germanic sub-branch of the Indo-European languages, which spread from Irish in the west of Europe, and includes the majority of languages spoken in Europe, encompasses a good number of the languages of the Middle East and India, and until they died out about ad 1000, even included languages spoken in Western China. (Those who want to know
