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1 Introduction: where is philology?

I am a philologist and not a philosopher – Paul de Man

Love of words
Lexicology, the study of words, is a division of linguistic research to which
a major contribution was made in the nineteenth century. Various meth-
ods philologists developed during this period may be collectively called
historical principles, because they treated each and every word as an entity
endowed with a temporal depth of its own. Historical principles helped
lexicologists explain why some words had multiple meanings that seemed
disparate and sometimes even contradictory with each other. For individ-
ual users of a given language, the semantic patterns of polysemous words
may seem infinitely varied and mysteriously intricate like the crystalline
patterns of snowflakes. In the eyes of nineteenth-century philologists, each
word had a semantic web whose design reflected its history concerning, for
example, how long it had been in circulation and how widely it had been
spread. Within a short span of time, a given word may exhibit so slight a
­semantic change that its departure from the existing sense would seem
almost negligible. After sufficient time, however, the variation of sense thus
accumulated could be substantial enough to make the word look semantic-
ally schizophrenic. The trajectory of such alteration of meaning in a word
would appear as a distinct pattern on its semantic web. If the word had
retained much of its earlier usage, the pattern would exhibit shades of sense
shifting gradually from one to the next. If it had lost many of its earlier
meanings, its web would appear to have holes, hence obscuring connections
among the currently available meanings. At least in its early stage, historical
lexicology was restorative in nature, because it mended these semantic holes
to recover the memory of words from previous generations.
Historical lexicologists had an outlook that departed from the one held in
the previous era. Prior to the nineteenth century, scholars who took interest
in words usually did so for one of two purposes. One was prescriptivism,
which authorized certain lexical usage and labelled all others as incorrect.
For the prescriptivists, therefore, the semantic web of each word consisted
1

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2 Introduction: where is philology?

of one or a few ‘correct’ meanings situated in the middle and surrounded

with the muddle of ‘errors’ and ‘solecisms’. The other was etymologism,
which sought to identify the original sense of each word and separate it
from derivative meanings. For the etymologists, therefore, the contour of a
semantic web was no more than a haze of secondary meanings that clouded
the radiant point of origin at the centre. While prescriptivism and etymolo-
gism had opposite vectors, one pointing towards the everlasting present and
the other towards the moment of origin beyond reach of time, they were in
essence the two sides of the coin of linguistic universalism, whose objective
was to protect language from decay and to arrest the meanings of words in
their ideal state. Because of their interest in the past, nineteenth-­century
philologists shared research material with the etymologists, but they would
go back in time only as far as the material could take them. At that point,
they would turn around and retrace the semantic footstep taken by each
word, sometimes following the line of borrowing from one language to
another, and sometimes pausing to examine cultural issues, social concerns
and political events that might have cast influence on its usage.
Few lexemes can demonstrate the intricacy of semantic change bet-
ter than the word philology itself. Its earliest known form is the Greek
­compound φιλολογία, which consists of φιλο- (‘love’) and λόγος (‘word’).
The word φιλολογία therefore pertains to love of words taken as a collect-
ive whole (logos) rather than individual entities (onoma). The morphological
construct of philology gives us a clue as to why this word has repeatedly
subverted attempts to give it a single clear-cut definition: already in ancient
Greek, the word logos was semantically so diverse that this compound had
­multiple meanings including ‘love of learning and literature’ and ‘love of
argument or reasoning’ (Liddell and Scott 1996, s.v.). The semantic ambi-
guity of φιλολογία seems to have been exploited by Socrates when he
applied to himself the adjectival form of the word, φιλόλογος as an epithet.
In Aristotelian writings, philological investigations concerned the study of
rhetoric, literary style and history (see Sandys 1903–8, i: 4–5). In the post-
classical era, the title of φιλόλογος (used substantively) was assumed by
Eratosthenes (c. 275–194 bce), a Greek polymath and poet who served as
director of the Alexandrian library. Some of his contemporaries called him a
pentathlos, ‘all-rounder’, to honour his mastery in multiple areas of learning.
Others called him beta, ‘second’, not necessarily because he was a second-
tier scholar but at least because he was never deemed second to none in any
one particular subject (Grant 1980, p. 147; see also Pfeiffer 1968, pp. 156–
60). Whatever its precise connotation, Eratosthenes’ nickname beta reveals
the nature of his engagement: he was not so much a specialist as a lover of
words who applied his aptitude to disciplines whose medium was language.
While philology has traditionally been associated with literature, it has
also allied with other disciplines that require careful examination of texts,
be they historical narratives, philosophical tracts, religious commentaries,

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Love of words 3

legal documents or scientific treatises. The Latin equivalent of the Greek

φιλόλογος, that is, philologus, could likewise be used substantively with a
meaning varying from ‘person engaged in learned or literary pursuits’ to
‘man of letters’ to ‘learned man’ to ‘scholar’. Compared to the grammaticus,
the philologus is concerned with language for the sake of a ‘broader culture’
as in ‘history, antiquities and literature’ (Lewis and Short 1907, s.v.).
The word philology has often been counted among the ranks of ­compounds
ending with –logy to denote ‘study of ’: e.g. astrology, theology, archae-
ology. The English language abounds in compounds of this category, since
the morpheme –logy has long been used to coin new terms for ­specialized
fields of study, mostly in earnest (e.g. bacteriology, immunology) but occa-
sionally also in jest (undergroundology, hatology) (see Simpson 2000– [OED
Online], –LOGY]). Though being one of the earliest-attested words of this
category, philology is structurally different from most other compounds
ending with –logy. To take archaeology for an example, this word consists
of two components (with the connective -o- in between), of which the
second, –logy, denotes action (‘study’), and the first, archaios, signifies its
object (‘that which is ancient or primitive’). This relationship is reversed in
philology, in which action (‘love’) is expressed by the first component, and
the object of its action (‘words’) is conveyed by the second (see Schestag
2007, p. 30).
In modern English, the morpheme philo- may be used to form nominal
compounds denoting ‘lover of ’ (e.g. philo-dramatist, philo-theorist) or adjec-
tival compounds meaning ‘x-loving’ (e.g. philo-musical, philo-­mathematical).
Although the morpheme philo- has been productive enough to allow the
formation of new words for more than two millennia, not many philo-
­compounds may be said to denote acts of mental exertion that are ­rigorous
enough to be considered scholarly endeavours (see Simpson 2000–,
PHILO-). Can we, for example, consider philotimy (‘love of honour’) or phi-
loxeny (‘love of hospitality’) to be an established branch of learning? What
about philo-pig (‘love[r] of pig’)? Augustine of Hippo scrutinized two acts
of love, philosophy and philocaly, in his discussion on whether any type of
study could lead one to truth and happiness. Pointing out that these two
‘have very similar surnames’, he treated them as siblings in their pursuit of
knowledge through love:
They would seem to be – truly, they are – of the same family, so to speak. In
fact, what is philosophy? It is love of wisdom. And what is philocaly? It is love of
beauty. Consult the Greeks on this point. But, what is wisdom? Is it not the true
beauty itself? Therefore, those two are assuredly akin, begotten of the same parent.
(Augustine 1948, p. 140 [Contra Academicos, 2.3.7])

In a similar vein John of Salisbury, in the Metalogicon, introduces philology

as a sibling of philocaly and philosophy, and treats these three sisters as alle-
gorical figures representing one’s innate appetite for reason, beauty and

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4 Introduction: where is philology?

wisdom, respectively. One should therefore prefer these three objects ‘to
aught else’ and pursue them with the utmost prudence: ‘Although human
infirmity dares not arrogantly promise these [three] to itself, it continually
seeks after them, namely, after true goodness, wisdom and reason, and it
is occupied in loving them, until, by the exercise of love with the help of
grace, it [ultimately] attains the objects of its affection’ ( John of Salisbury
2009, pp. 246–7).

Philology in the English lexicon

The English word philology has been in use since the early modern period, and
it has wrought a complex web of meaning through the 500 years of iteration.
While the subsequent chapters will examine philology as it was practised in
the nineteenth century, this section will provide an overview of the history of
the English word philology with special attention paid to its usage before and
after this particular period. A convenient starting point may be the treatment
of this word in several editions of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In
both the first and second editions, philology is ­presented as an adoption of
the French philologie, which itself was an adaptation of the Latin philologia,
which in turn was a loanword from the Greek. In these editions, philology
is given two major semantic divisions, general and specific. Of the two, the
general sense is earlier than the specific one, with the first citation dated to
1614 for the former and 1716 for the latter. The third edition of the OED has
pushed the terminus a quo of the general sense back to 1522 with a citation
taken from the poetry of John Skelton (‘Nor of philosophy, Nor of philology,
Nor of good pollycy, Nor of astronomy’). The date could be moved even fur-
ther to the late Middle Ages, if we should recognize Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s
references to anthropomorphized philology in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis
Philologiae et Mercurii (Simpson 2000–, s.v.).
In the first edition of the OED, which was completed in 1928 under the
title New English Dictionary and reissued with corrections in 1933, the defi-
nitions of philology given under the general sense are reminiscent of those
of Greek φιλολογία and Latin philologia: ‘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 scholar-
ship; polite learning’. This section ends with a brief remark on usage: ‘Now
rare in general sense’. The definitions of philology given under the specific
sense are succinct: ‘The study of the structure and development of lan-
guage; the science of language; linguistics’. The specific sense of philology
is labelled as ‘in mod[ern] use’, and its section ends with a brief comment
placed in square brackets, that this is ‘Really one branch’ of philology in the
general sense (Murray, et al. 1933, s.v. (italics in the original)).
The second edition of the OED has retained the basic framework of
the entry for philology, but added material from the Supplement volume

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Philology in the English lexicon 5

­ ublished in 1982 (Simpson and Weiner 1989, s.v.; Burchfield 1972–86,

p
s.v.). It therefore provides the general sense with the same definitions as
before (i.e. ‘the study of literature, in a wide sense’, etc.) and the same usage
note (i.e. ‘Now rare in general sense’). But this note is now appended with
a seemingly minor modification: ‘except in the US’.1 The second edition
prints all of the quotations for the general sense given in the first edition,
but it also offers a good number of new quotations. The function of this
substantial addition, which derives from the Supplement, was apparently to
support the modified usage note, since many of the quotations are from the
writing of twentieth-century American authors such as the one by Benjamin
Whorf given below:
a1941 B. L. WHORF in Ann. Rep. Board of Regents Smithsonian Inst. 1941 (1942)
502 As the major linguistic difficulties are conquered, the study becomes more
and more philological; that is to say, subject matter, cultural data, and history play
an increasing role … This is philology. But at the base of philology we must have
linguistics.
All of the original definitions for the specific sense of philology are found in
the second edition (i.e. ‘the study of the structure’, etc.), but they are now
followed by a long explanatory note: ‘Now usu[ally] restricted to the study
of the development of specific languages or language families, esp[ecially]
research into phonological and morphological history based on written doc-
uments.’2 The overall impression given by the second edition of the OED is
that the specific sense of philology has become even more specific by the late
twentieth century to the point of being virtually obsolescent. This impres-
sion seems to be corroborated by the additional usage note, taken, again,
from the Supplement and printed in smaller font at the end of the section:
‘This sense has never been current in the US. Linguistics is now the more
usual term for the study of the structure of language, and, with qualify-
ing adjective or adjective phrase, is replacing philology even in the restricted
sense.’
The two versions of the philology entry just examined help us understand
how the meaning and function of the word changed over the course of the
twentieth century.3 In the early twentieth century, the specific (or ‘mod-
ern’) sense of philology was so prominent that it had made the general (or
traditional) sense of the word seem rare. By the 1980s, the specific sense
of philology had become exceedingly narrow, because most of its semantic
field had been taken over by linguistics. Seeing that the sense of philology

1
This view seems to be advocated in R. W. Burchfield’s Supplement, which has a slightly dif-
ferent phrasing: ‘Still the usual sense in the US’ (Burchfield 1972–86, s.v.).
2
The Supplement specifies this as British usage, arguing that this sense has never been wide-
spread in the United States (ibid.).
3
It was 1906 when the New English Dictionary published the original entry for philology in
its fascicle for Ph - Piper.

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6 Introduction: where is philology?

had shifted from general to specific to very narrow in less than 100 years,
one may wonder whether the first two editions of the OED ­witnessed the
decline of the field of language studies that had made its very production
possible. But the entry for philology in the second edition also gives us a dif-
ferent picture: the progressive semantic narrowing outlined in the first two
editions of the OED apparently did not affect the English-speaking world
evenly. In the United States in particular, the specific sense of the word has
never taken root and the general sense of the word might have never been
marginalized.4
By noting the subtle changes made to the original entry for philology
­during the 1980s, we may be able to identify a number of issues that seem
to have contributed to the destabilization of the semantic field of philology
in the past century: a conflict between general and specific (or between
traditional and ‘modern’) senses of the word, rivalry between philology
and ­linguistics, and different usage observed within the English-speaking
world. To this already complex picture might be added one more factor
that however seems no less significant: correlation between the English
word ­philology and its cognates in other languages. The earliest example of
semantic intervention by a cognate of philology is probably the now obso-
lete meaning ‘love of talk or argument’, which was briefly circulated in the
seventeenth century, with the first and last attested examples dated to 1623
and 1678, respectively. This usage, labelled as ‘Chiefly depreciative’, was
apparently borrowed by learned doctors from one of the meanings of Greek
φιλολογία and applied to philology, an English lexeme that had already
existed as a loanword adopted from French philologie and used in the gen-
eral sense (Simpson 2000–, s.v. section 2). As for the specific sense of the
English word philology, a question was raised as early as 1922 by the Danish
scholar Otto Jespersen. In his book Language, Jespersen suggests that the
words philology and linguist(ics) be used in a way analogous to their cognates
on the continent:
In this book I shall use the word ‘philology’ in its continental sense, which is often
rendered in English by the vague word ‘scholarship’, meaning thereby the study of
the specific culture of one nation; thus we speak of Latin philology, Greek philology,
Icelandic philology, etc. The word ‘linguist’, on the other hand, is not infrequently
used in the sense of one who has merely a practical knowledge of some foreign lan-
guage; but I think I am in accordance with a growing number of scholars in England
and America if I call such a man a ‘practical linguist’ and apply the word ‘linguist’
by itself to the scientific student of language.5

4
Another possibility is that the general sense of philology had become rare all over the
English-speaking world by 1906, but that it had been revived in the United States by 1989
(see Simpson 2000–, s.v.).
5
Jespersen 1922, p. 64. A similar argument was made by John Webster Spargo, who translated
Holger Pedersen’s The Discovery of Language. Spargo explains in the preface to the English
edition, dated 1930: ‘In translating the Danish words sprogvidenskab and filologi, the English

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Philological turn 7

As implied by Jespersen, the specific sense of philology was a ­development

almost exclusive to the English language. But this does not necessarily
mean that philology had a monolithic sense or fixed usage in other mod-
ern European languages. On the contrary, the complexity of philology
captured the imagination of continental scholars, particularly in the inter-
bellum, who were compelled to deliberate on its potential. In a letter to
Gerhard Scholem, dated 14 February 1921, Walter Benjamin calls attention
to ­philology’s unique ability to see the past from multiple perspectives –
an ability, in other words, to work as a powerful antidote to the totalizing
effects of history proper:
I have given some thought to philology … I was always aware of its seductive side.
It seems to me – and I do not know whether I understand it in the same sense as
you – that, like all historical research, philology promises the same joys that the
Neo-platonists sought in the asceticism of contemplation, but in this instance taken
to the extreme. Perfection instead of ­consummation, the guaranteed extinction of
morality (without smothering its fire). It presents one side of history, or better, one
layer of what is historical, for which a person may indeed be able to gain regulative
and systematic, as well as constitutive, elementary logical concepts; but the con-
nection between them must remain hidden. I define philology, not as the science or
history of language, but as the history of terminology [Geschichte der Terminologie]
at its deepest level. In doing this, a most puzzling concept of time and very puzzling
phenomena must surely be taken into consideration. If I am not mistaken, I have an
idea of what you are getting at, without being able to elaborate on it, when you sug-
gest that philology is close to history viewed as a chronicle [Chronik]. The chron-
icle is fundamentally interpolated history. Philological ­interpolation in chronicles
simply reveals in its form the intention of the content, since its content interpolates
history.6

Philological turn
The second edition of the OED – which has been described as ‘a mer-
ging together of the earlier Dictionary with Burchfield’s four volumes of
Supplement’ – not only chronicles a decline of modern philology in the
twentieth century but also anticipates a new philological movement in the
twenty-first (Brewer 2007, p. 11). Because of the sheer volume of work

words linguistics and philology have been used, respectively. Present usage is quite distinctly
tending toward a differentiation of terms for the activities formerly combined under the one
word philology … This usage detracts in no way from the scope of the old usage of phil-
ology, and in addition introduces a precision desirable for the more highly specialized field’
(Pedersen 1931, p. viii). The third edition of the OED records the early usage of Portuguese
filologia and German Philologie and in so doing suggests the interconnectedness of cognates
in modern European languages.
6
Benjamin 1994, pp. 175–6, and Benjamin 1995–2000, ii: 136–7 (italics in the original); see
also Lerer 1996).

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8 Introduction: where is philology?

on philology that has appeared since the last decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, I shall here direct my attention mainly to two of the earliest publi-
cations in this movement. Both are collections of essays that appeared in
1990. The first one is a set of articles printed in the special issue of the
­medieval journal Speculum under the title ‘The New Philology’. This publi-
cation provoked immediate response both from those who were bewildered
by its newness, and from those who saw in it a potential for an alternative
approach to the study of medieval language and literature (e.g. Busby 1993
and Paden 1994).
This award-winning issue by and large contemplated new directions by
re-examining the established methods of study in the field. In their efforts to
break away from whatever was conceived as old philology, the contributors
generally took one of two options that were opposite in temporal direction-
ality, but which were by no means mutually exclusive (see Nichols 1990).
One was to reconsider philology in the light of two areas of language studies
that emerged during the twentieth century, namely, linguistics and literary
theory with linguistic orientation. The other was to advocate a return to an
earlier practice of philology, wherever this point of origin might be located.
Contributors who identified the old philology as that of the Renaissance
argued for the incompatibility of modern philology with pre-modern texts
that had been produced before the invention of the printing press. In their
opinion, manuscripts represented texts that were neither fixed nor defini-
tive, because they were artefacts of an oral-based culture in which ‘writ-
ing was dictated and reading was carried out viva voce’ (Fleischman 1990,
p. 20). After the Renaissance, they argued, philologists regarded texts
as written material permanently set in print. These philologists included
humanists who were preoccupied with assembling works of antiquity in
order to reproduce classical literature in printed form; editors from nine-
teenth-century Germany, who in their romantic idealism arranged extant
manuscripts of medieval texts in orderly stemmata and placed reconstructed
Urtexts at the top; and even twentieth-century textual critics who, following
the French tradition, deemed the editing of pre-modern texts synonymous
with printing what they considered the best version, while listing ‘variants’
on the bottom of each page as an apparatus (see Nichols 1990, pp. 2–7, and
Fleischman 1990, pp. 20 and 25–7; cf. Cerquiglini 1999).
The Speculum edition of the ‘New Philology’ frequently appealed to the
idea of origin as in ‘a return to the manuscripts, not merely as sources of
editions, but as “the original texts”’ (Fleischman 1990, p. 25). Given the fact
that the history of philology goes back to antiquity, any call for a return to
the origin of philology should be understood only in the relativity of time
(see R. H. Bloch 1990, p. 38). It is nonetheless suggestive that one of the
earliest attempts to reconsider philology in the late twentieth century was
made by specialists in the Middle Ages, a period that was, to quote one of
the contributors, rejected by the moderns as ‘a millennium of middleness,

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Philological turn 9

a space that serves simply to hold apart the first beginning of antiquity and
the Renaissance rebeginning’ (Patterson 1990, p. 92). The ‘New Philology’
issue was therefore effective especially when it questioned ‘the gigantic
master narrative by which modernity identifies itself with the Renaissance
and rejects the Middle Ages as by definition premodern’. From a medieval-
ist viewpoint, this ‘pervasive and apparently ineradicable grand récit that
organizes Western cultural history’ is no more than a narrative invented and
reinscribed by self-confident modern men, of whom Petrarch may well have
been the first (ibid.; cf. Robinson 1984 and Mommsen 1942).
Another collaborative attempt to rethink philology was made in the field
of literary studies at large. In 1990, the journal Comparative Literature
Studies published a special-focus issue entitled ‘What Is Philology?’7
The pieces included in this collection were based on a conference held
two years earlier at Harvard University under the aegis of the Center for
Literary and Cultural Studies. The participants specialized in many dif-
ferent periods and language groups, and their opinions – which, too, were
often polarized between text and theory – showed how diverse the prac-
tice of philology could be. One panel member maintained that philology’s
‘quest for facts and truths about literary texts’ should point to ‘a separ-
ation of literature and criticism, as being distinct in kind and therefore
beyond competition’ (Thomas 1990, p. 69). Another argued, echoing Paul
de Man, that ‘what is truly radical in theory is philology’ ( Johnson 1990,
p. 29 (italics in the original); cf. de Man 1986b). One talk began with the
premise that ‘philology is the basis of literary criticism’, whereas another
ended with the assertion that ‘the notion of philology as a basis which is
somehow prior to literary and cultural interpretation is an idea that one
should seriously question’ (Clausen 1990, p. 13, and Culler 1990, p. 52).
One speaker detected a crisis of philology already in 496 bce, when the
deaths of schoolboys under a collapsed roof in the community of Chios
was interpreted as an omen presaging not only a political disaster in the
region but also the narrowing of the scope of philology to written texts and
hence to grammata (‘letters’) (Nagy 1990). But another speaker contended
that we had only to look to the philology of the early nineteenth century to
set Lady Philology free from the tedious and perverse job of teaching anx-
iety-ridden English graduate students at Harvard and elsewhere how to
translate Gothic with the aid of a grammar written in German.8 The con-
ference ‘What is Philology?’ generated almost as many answers to its title
question as the number of the participants, because, to quote its organizer
Jan Ziolkowski, this ‘debate over the place of philology in the curriculum
was presented unabashedly as a power struggle’ (Ziolkowski 1990b, p. 9).
7
Volume 27, number 1. The proceedings were reissued in the same year as an independent
volume under the title On Philology (Ziolkowski 1990a); all citations are taken from this
edition.
8
Simon 1990. This sketch of graduate pedagogy is based on Bate 1982, p. 49.

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If seen strictly as a medium for power, philology might be given no more

than ‘a relational identity’, to use Jonathan Culler’s expression, in that ‘it
depends on what it is opposed to’. Hence ‘the question what is philology
is the question of what are the relevant oppositions that divide, delimit,
articulate the domain of P’s’, that is, the body of writing on language and
literature, to which the letter P is assigned in the classification system of
the Library of Congress.9
Culler called for philology once again in his 2002 essay entitled ‘The
Return to Philology’. Taking its title as well as inspiration from de Man’s
essay, Culler’s piece reconceives the domain of literature as philology’s dou-
ble. Just as philology has the ability to cut across the boundaries of fields
and subjects, literature is a discipline that is capable not only of combining
the humanistic and the historical but also of relating itself ‘to theology in
its hermeneutic task of determining the meaning of culturally important
texts and to moral philosophy in its responsibility for a corpus of ­writing
dealing with the deepest problems of human experience’ (Culler 2002,
pp. 12–13). The expression ‘the return to philology’ was also used as a title
for one of the chapters in Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism
(2004). The chapter in question begins with a description of philology that
is a dead ringer for Wyatt’s ‘Phil’: ‘Philology is just about’, writes Said,
‘the least with-it, least sexy, and most unmodern of any of the branches
of ­learning associated with humanism’. However unmodern and unsexy it
may be, philology is an integral part of Said’s own scholarly and cultural
identity. As love of words, it comprises ‘a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a
lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used
by human beings who existed in history’. And ‘as a discipline it acquires a
quasi-­scientific intellectual and spiritual prestige at various periods in all of
the major cultural traditions, including the Western and the Arabic-Islamic
traditions that have framed my own development’ (Said 2004, pp. 57–8 and
61). In his view, the humanism of America today is in great need of phil-
ology, because
A true philological reading is active; it involves getting inside the process of lan-
guage already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or
incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us. In this view
of language, then, words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassum-
ingly for a higher reality; they are, instead, an integral formative part of the reality
itself. (ibid., p. 59)

9
Culler 1990, p. 49. Specialists in library science would be quick to tell us, in the voice of
Saussure or Plato’s Hermogenes, that letters in call numbers are completely arbitrary. For
ordinary users of research libraries, however, it is almost inevitable to make a connection
between some letters in the call numbers and the subjects they signify: e.g. <G> for geog-
raphy, <M> for music, <T> for technology and perhaps <R> for medicine. Even within
the ‘domain of P’s’ (i.e. language and literature), PE stands for English language, and PD
for German or Germanic language (deutsch).

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