I was going to write a post or two about editing classical texts, and I’ll get back to that sometime soon, but I thought I’d take a break and just talk about some words. This post is part of a group I think of as etymological entertainments. I love etymology. Etymology was maybe the first … Continue reading Etymology and Entomology

In my last couple of posts I’ve been exploring the editing of texts, one of the four aspects of my conception of philology. I imagined a philologist two thousand years in the future who is trying to deal with English-language texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; her situation was a sort of analogue to … Continue reading When is a Mistake not a Mistake?

In my previous post I imagined a philologist of the future struggling to read and understand ancient books, books from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In that post our philologist was dealing with the word “rtaffic”, which didn’t make any sense at all and didn’t even seem to be an English word. The problem was … Continue reading Rocks On My Shoulders

Imagine that it’s two thousand years in the future, around the year 4000 AD or so (assuming that dates in that year are still figured in AD or perhaps CE), and imagine someone at that future time who is a professor of Ancient English Language and Literature, with a specialization in the literature of the … Continue reading Philology in the Future

I thought I was finished with congeries, at least for a while, but then some late-breaking news came in. First, I got a very interesting email from Paul, who asked if The Twelve Days of Christmas counts as a congeries. Wow!!! I would say Yes, definitely, it’s a heap of stuff, without any grammatical connection, … Continue reading A Little More on Congeries