Tom Shippey is a medievalist, a Tolkienist, and a spectacularly grumpy fellow to judge from the quotes I’ve seen from him at Laudator Temporis Acti. The latest (from The Road to Middle-Earth) proves him to be spectacularly ignorant about dictionaries as well:
Dictionary definitions are, symptomatically, unhelpful. The OED, though conceived and created by philologists and borne along by the subject’s nineteenth-century prestige, has almost nothing useful to offer. ‘Philology’ it suggests, is: ‘I. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation … polite learning. Now rare in general sense.’ Under 2 it offers ‘love of talk, speech or argument’ (this is an offensive sense in which philology is mere logic-chopping, the opposite of true philosophy); while 3 recovers any ground abandoned in 1 by saying it is ‘The study of the structure and development of language; the science of language; linguistics. (Really one branch of sense 1.)’ So ‘philology’ is ‘lang.’ and ‘lit.’ too, all very charitable but too vague to be any use. The Deutsches Wörterbuch set in motion by Jacob Grimm (himself perhaps the greatest of all philologists and responsible in true philological style for both ‘Grimm’s Law of Consonants’ and Grimms’ Fairy Tales) could do little better, defining philologie with similar inclusiveness as ‘the learned study of the (especially Classical) languages and literatures’. The illustrative quotation from Grimm’s own work is more interesting in its declaration that ‘none among all the sciences is prouder, nobler, more disputatious than philology, or less merciful to error’; this at least indicates the expectations the study had aroused. Still, if you didn’t know what ‘philology’ was already, the Grimm definition would not enlighten you.
Like so many people, he wants the dictionary to define words not as other people (the unwashed masses) use them but as he (the One Who Knows) wishes them to be used. But what shows him to be not merely ignorant but duplicitous as well is that “ … ” in the first OED definition. Here’s the unabridged version:
1. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature, in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning. Now rare in gen. sense except in the U.S.
Note that the part he excises — I’ve bolded it — is exactly the part that covers the sense he wants. His grumpiness doesn’t shock me, but that dishonest twisting of the evidence does; I have even less respect for him than I did before.
That is the definition from the original OED, which is of course the one he was using; they updated the entry in March 2006, and this is the new version:
1. Love of learning and literature; the branch of knowledge that deals with the historical, linguistic, interpretative, and critical aspects of literature; literary or classical scholarship. Now chiefly U.S.
By the late 19th cent. this general sense had become rare, but it was revived, principally in the United States, in the early 20th cent. For a fuller discussion of this, see A. Morpurgo Davies Hist. Linguistics (1998) 4 i. 22.
Nice to see Anna Morpurgo Davies cited; after hiding out from the fascists as a child in Rome (her family was Jewish), she became an Indo-European linguist and expert in the Anatolian languages, and I heard her name frequently when I was an IE grad student. I’m sorry to learn from that Wikipedia article that she died in 2014.
Update. In the comments, Nelson Goering suggests I am misunderstanding the sense Shippey has in mind, which may well be; in that case, I withdraw the “duplicitous” bit, though it’s still not clear to me why he made that abridgment in the definition or why he doesn’t feel the OED’s definition 3 covers the desired sense.
Shippey himself seems rather confused about the meaning of the word. The remarkable Joseph Wright was what would nowadays be called a linguist specialising in dialectology and comparative work, and I suspect that the horrid German discipline that the British Board of Education (bless their cotton socks) found to be so liable to corrupt our youth was, well, linguistics. It is indeed regrettable that these Bad People objected so foolishly to linguistics, but they were surely not, in point of fact, actually objecting to what is nowadays called “philology.” You know, “the branch of knowledge that deals with the historical, linguistic, interpretative, and critical aspects of literature; literary or classical scholarship.”
I think those people in cotton socks were half-right (which means, they stayed (or sat) at 45 degrees). WWI was really fought against philology, but philology won. Russian revolution and the resignation of the Kaiser just confused everyone about the outcome.
ADD: Laudator has much more sensible approach to the question here.
I was lucky enough to take Anna Morpurgo Davies’s graduate seminar when she was the Sather professor at Berkeley (and I was a wet-behind-the-ears grad student who hardly knew who she was). She was as self-deprecating as she was laudatory of others — any marginally insightful comment any of us made was praised as “extraordinarily brilliant”. You’d never had known she was a Dame Commander of the British Empire. She embarrassed me in an early class by informing us all that she was face-blind so couldn’t be expected to identify any of us on sight, “except TR — he is different somehow”. I later visited her in Oxford where she took me around the colleges with boundless energy and could have kept going when I, half her age, was on my last legs. I didn’t get to see her personal library, which by all accounts was magnificent.
a spectacularly grumpy fellow
That seems like a slightly ironic thing to say in this post…
the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.
This is of course not the definition of philology that Shippey is ultimately driving at — his point (though it might not be clear from this short excerpt) is to introduce the concept of ‘comparative philology’ as a specific technical discipline that was very important to Tolkien. He’s not uninterested in the literature and history angle, but to say that this ‘is exactly the part that covers the sense he wants’ is just incorrect (never mind going on to talk about being ‘duplicitous’ from there).
Whether or not you like this particular rhetorical angle or not is another matter. I don’t suppose you’re obliged to. But it’s probably fair to acknowledge that he’s clearly being a bit rhetorical here, as is pretty usual for him. I remember reading this book in high school, when I had no real conception of what ‘philology’ in any sense might be. I found it a rather helpful first taste of what comparative philology might be, written in an engaging and accessible manner. I rather imagine it’s only the overeducated who’d find nits to pick here, and it’s exactly for the benefit of the ‘unwashed masses’ that he’s writing.
Now Shippey isn’t himself a comparative philologist, and I do now have some (overeducated) quibbles of my own with how he characterizes the field or presents specific details. But those come in elsewhere in the book.
but to say that this ‘is exactly the part that covers the sense he wants’ is just incorrect
No it’s not. I didn’t say it covered exactly the sense he wants, which would have been incorrect, I said it was exactly the part that covers the sense he wants, which is true, assuming the sense he wants has anything to do with anything covered by the term. You tell me why he excised that part if he wasn’t being duplicitous.
‘I said it was exactly the part that covers the sense he wants’
But it’s not. How on earth does that cover comparative philology? He wants to get at Grimm’s law, and linguistic family trees, and proto-languages. Absolutely none of that is covered in any meaningful way by ‘the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.’
What is the difference between “comparative philology” and “comparative linguistics”?
The phrase “the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.” is somewhat ambiguous, but my best reading is not how literature and the written record changed over time (which is still not historical liguistics), but how the literature and written record illuminate history. This, however, would put it into the “history” corner of my mental map. In any event, why Shippey decision to excise these very words is surprising.
But if that’s the sense he wants, why the devil doesn’t he approve of this?
I’ve added an Update to indicate Nelson’s objection to my understanding of the quote.
Now that’s a fairer objection, though if you’re trying to get to comparative philology it really still isn’t very helpful. That basically amounts just to defining general historical linguistics, with only the barest hint (‘or language families’) of the rather important concept of comparing related languages and reconstructing proto-languages. Given that he’s trying to convey Tolkien’s interests in ‘star-spangled grammar’, I don’t think he’s being terribly unfair (though again, I don’t think he’s actually so much complaining about the dictionary in earnest as just taking a rather convenient rhetorical approach — this based on my sense of his writing and speaking style in general).
OK, you clearly have a better understanding of his ideas and style than I do; thanks for the explanation.
Oh, and I wasn’t objecting to his grumpiness, just noting it — as you point out, I can be quite grumpy myself, and my favorite radio show for years was The No Show, “a showcase for the idiosyncratic views and humor of Steve Post, a world-class curmudgeon whose irreverence and iconoclasm entertained audiences and appalled radio station managers for four decades.”
So the consensus is that Shippey is complaining specifically about people who objected to historical comparative linguistics?
If so, it’s unfortunate that he calls it “philology”, because that is not what the word, used in isolation, actually means (any more than “Christianity” means “Calvinism.” *) He should have said “comparative philology”, which is an obsolete term, but does at least mean more or less what he’s on about.
On the actual objection: I, like most Hatters, find “comparative philology” fascinating. I have, however, noticed that when I attempt to share this enthusiasm, people’s eyes glaze over with interest. However, I have learnt to live with it; though I yield to no man in grumpiness myself.
* Obviously it should; but, unaccountably, it seems not to …
As Hat has assured us that xkcd is always relevant:
https://xkcd.com/1704/
“COMPARATIVE Philology, or, to adopt its German appellation, the science of Linguistic, is still in its infancy among us.” — Opening line of a lengthy (unsigned) essay in the March 1837 issue of the New-York Review* which purports to be a review of the 1828-published “Principes de l’etude comparative des Langues, par le Baron de Merian.”
*There have been several periodicals of that title, modulo hyphenation. This is the one that was run by the Rev’d Francis Lister Hawks (1798-1866) and the Rev’d Caleb Sprague Henry (1804-1884).
That basically amounts just to defining general historical linguistics, with only the barest hint (‘or language families’) of the rather important concept of comparing related languages and reconstructing proto-languages.
Maybe I’m missing something, but what is the distinction between historical linguistics and comparative philology that he’s making?
what is the distinction between historical linguistics and comparative philology that he’s making?
In modern terms, we’d usually regard comparative philology (by no means a wholly obsolete term, though rarer than it once was) as a subfield of historical linguistics. This is how every textbook on ‘historical linguistics’ from the past 30 years I’ve seen does it. But most historical linguists today are not comparative philologists, and study the history of single languages, either through written documentation or through fieldwork on ongoing changes, or do work that is comparative in a typological sense (also very valuable). These things don’t necessarily give you any particular expertise in the comparative method and linguistic reconstruction: the bread and butter of ‘comparative philology’ (or whatever you want to call it).
In Shippey’s favor, a couple of pages later he makes a remark that we can all agree with: after explaining that the Grimm’s law counterpart of Latin porcus is not “pig” but “farrow”, he observes, “The mill of comparisons will not work on basic or standard or literary languages alone, but demands ever-increasing grist from older or localised or sub-standard forms.” An excellent thing to stress when writing for the public.
(This strikes me as basically the same point as J.W. Brewer’s comment here on the “virtuous cycle” of Indo-European: there was a time when the way to make your mark as an academic was to be the first to relate “some low-class no-account peasant language still extant and ‘indigenous’ to one of the less posh bits of Eastern Europe (Lithuania)” to the larger puzzle.)
A few pages further, Shippey refers to “Primitive Germanic” and “Primitive Indo-European”, which sounded weird to me; Google ngrams indicate that those terms do have a history of use, but have been out of fashion for many decades, replaced by Proto-. I don’t think Shippey would have used them if his own career had been in historical linguistics. His footnotes go to Pedersen, Bloomfield, and Jespersen from the 1920s and 1930s, nothing later, since he’s portraying the field as it was during Tolkien’s early career.
Yeah, I don’t think Shippey is fundamentally wrong-headed, just determinedly and annoyingly stuck in the past (which he, like Laudator Temporis Acti itself, clearly prefers to the degenerate present).
I am slightly alarmed to see ktschwarz keeping track of things I had said that I had completely forgotten but relieved to learn that I was apparently being sensible.
Oh, I got used to that long ago. (Sometimes I’ll start reading a comment and think “I agree with that,” and then scroll further and discover I wrote it.)
the Grimm’s law counterpart of Latin porcus is not “pig” but “farrow”
… and Kusaal kukur “pig” (plural kukuya) is the very same etymon, borrowed via Portuguese, and remodelled just a little in the course of its journey up from the coast.
Sometimes I’ll start reading a comment and think “I agree with that,” and then scroll further and discover I wrote it.
An experience I have had in the outpatient clinic (yes, really):
Patient: Thanks, Doctor. I must say you’re much more understanding than the last doctor I saw. He was very abrupt. I didn’t take to him at all.
DE: (reading casenotes, last entry in which is initialled “DE”): Yeah. He lacks people skills …
“And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme …”
I regret to say that the good old word “farrow” seems to be in dramatic decline in usage in English over the last century, as Anglophone societies have decisively shifted from ones in which the majority of folks had grown up on farms to ones in which pork comes from the supermarket already cut up and wrapped in plastic and what happened before it got to the supermarket is vague and uncertain.
@ktschwarz
In earlier linguistic literature, Proto-Germanic was called Primitive Germanic (as well as Common Germanic and Ur-Germanic), which was not at all a pejorism. See, for example,
1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/411250
2. https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/131580/Books_2010_2019_072-2014-1_8.pdf?sequence=1
3. Old Germanic Languages (a book published by De Gruyter)
The word goes back to Classical Latin primitiuus ‘early, first-formed’, which derives from Classical Latin primitiae ‘the beginnings’ (literally, ‘first fruits [of agricultural produce]’), neither of which words is pejorative either.
Likewise, Primitive Slavic ~ Slavonic, Primitive Romance, and so on:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110892499.614/pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/410406
This was very popular. Translation of first 2 minutes (before they begin singing):
Doctor: Next… What’s the problem?
Patient: Doctor, I have this
D: Well?
P: [shows]
D: I can see it right away… and what is the problem?
P: Doctor, I have this
D: Well?
P: [shows]
D: Well, this is just trifles [= change] … but what is the problem?
P: Doctor, I have this
D: Well?
P: When you are forgetting everything
D: Ah! I remember. In the language of medicine it is called … well, this
P: I didn’t get it
D: You must know
P: Well, I do know
D: I know as well, but won’t tell … and what is the problem?
P: Doctor, I have this
D: Well?
P: I explain [bangs on D’s head]
D: Enter!
P: I am already here
D: Do you want to see me as well?
P: I was coming to you
D: And what is your problem?
P: I am forgetting everything
D: And I remember everything. You came to me already
P: When?
D: Just before now … Why are you coming to me so often, dear?
Regarding my comment of 2 May at 7:54 PM, I neglected to read far enough in ktschwarz’s comment to see that he recognizes the earlier use of Primitive as non-pejorative in certain older glottonyms.
Similarly, Vulgar, as in Vulgar Latin, is obsolescing because of widespread use of the adjective vulgar in a pejorative sense otherwise.