August Schleicher's reflections on the autonomy and complementarity of Linguistics and Philology

Abstract

Although language scholars in the first half of the 19th century recognized their divergent paths from their predecessors, they largely refrained from clearly distinguishing their practices from classical philology, opting instead to characterize their discipline as ‘neue Philologie’ (new philology). It was not until the second half of the century that German linguist August Schleicher (1821-1868) devoted part of his work to differentiating between two fields of language science, which he termed Philologie and Linguistik. In this paper, we aim to reconstruct, analyze, and interpret Schleicher’s general conceptions of language as expressed in his 1850 work, along with his descriptions of the objects and specific methods of both philology and linguistics, which enabled him to assert the autonomy of these fields. Schleicher employed a typological analysis of languages, conceptualizing language as a natural organism, thus justifying the application of methods akin to those of the natural sciences in his research. By identifying and classifying languages as monosyllabic (isolating), agglutinative, and inflectional, he advocated for an investigation grounded in linguistic comparison. In contrast, philology utilizes language as a medium. Based on Schleicher's definitions, we argue that claims regarding his identity as a philologist do not hold, considering the autonomy he ascribes to linguistics in relation to philology.