Philology

1. EUROPEAN LITERATUREThis book includes the literary contributions of the main European countries from the ancient times through to the current geographical and political divisions. The countries included in the write-up are: Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Greece.In the case of Italy, the write-up includes the Roman Empire contributions covering the continuation of the conquered countries' involvements, excluding the Byzantine era, as this comes under the Greek literary and authors' inputs.Regarding the Hellenic philology, additional to the Byzantine (or the Eastern Roman Empire as some historians prefer to call it), the Greek literary successes include the Alexandrian and Cypriot period.Historically and comparatively, philology as a term is used to explain linguistics; a type of linguistics which studies the ways in which specific languages have developed and the ways in which languages in general can change, and which seeks by comparing languages with a common ancestor to learn something about the nature of the ancestor. This type of linguistics was particularly important in the 19th century when the details of the Indo-European family of languages were mapped out. It was commonly known at that time as comparative philology. Recent work in historical linguistics has drawn on the insights of theoretical linguistics and sociolinguistics.As the word philology is derived from the classical Greek, it can be interpreted in modern times to include the meaning of literature, its study as a wholesome subject and to include authors and their titles of literary works. The book, therefore, will concentrate on literature and authors of the main European countries.In this case, the use of the meaning of the words is unavoidable. Etymology, therefore, is that branch of historical linguistics studying the ancestry of the form and meaning of words. It draws on the theory of regular sound change in the development of one language or across languages. For example, 'king' is related to Old English cyning; and the Welsh pedwar (meaning 'four') is related to the Latin quattuor.As such, it must be noted that people communicate with each other by means of various systems of signs, of which the most universal are language, a system of auditory communication, and gesture language and writing; two systems of visual communication. For the general science of signs, several terms have been proposed, of which the term semiotic, or semiotics, as here preferred, may perhaps be the most appropriate. Semiotics covers a much broader area than the term semantics, which deals with the meaning of linguistic elements. 2. PHILOLOGYApart from literature, philology is involved mainly in the study of the linguistic sources of a people or a group of peoples, forms the basic means for the comprehension of their respective cultures. It deals less with oral sources than with written sources, mainly literature (whatever its exact meaning).Philology deals with the formal aspects of writing under the topic of epigraphy and paleography. Linguistics is concerned with the study of linguistic systems as reconstructed mainly from oral sources. Pursued less than the study of "oral language," the study of the "written language" - that is, of the language as it is used in written sources - is also a matter of linguistics. Additionally, linguistics deals with the structural aspects of writing under the heading of graphemics. Otherwise, it is the field of study that deals with writing in the broadest sense, and it is called grammatology. So, equally appropriate terms for this subject are grammatonomy and graphonomy.