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Ever since the development of historical linguistics as a separate field of study in the 19th century, its relation to philology, especially to classical philology, has experienced a course of mixed character that ranges from indifference to antagonism, to a harmonious coexistence and even to close collaboration with the formation of new interdisciplinary trends in which the linguistic and the philological approaches reunite and collaborate. The turning point in this course is the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the Neogrammarians and the primacy of linguistics over philology with respect to the theoretical foundations of the proposed correlation. The present article discusses the arguments in favor of the relation of linguistics and philology touching upon topics that may be common ground of activity like etymology, textual criticism, text linguistics, poetics, the study of dialects, writing, teaching, the relation to other fields such as history, archaeology, myth, and culture, and many other areas of common interest.
The relation of language to myth is old and seems to reside on man’s need as a thinking subject to explain the mysteries of the surrounding world. Many people suggest that myth is a code system similar to that of language, and hence like language it organizes the unknown world into a balanced structure. A tertium comparationis is religion: language, myth, and religion try each in its own way and by its own means to rationalize the world, and this seems to be the crucial point where language and myth meet and collaborate.