bodine . . .

In the Lambdin festschrift (1987: Working With No Data), Walter Bodine contributed a chapter entitled "Linguistics and Philology in the Study of Ancient Near Eastern Languages." Bodine is probably best known for his work in Hebrew linguistics and discourse analysis. In fact, I believe he was one of the principal figures in the establishment of SBL's Biblical Hebrew and Linguistics section in the early 80's. Lately, I believe he is working on Ur III (?) contracts and other economic texts in the Babylonian Collection at Yale.

In the first part of this essay, he discusses the historical "hostility" between linguistics and philology. After distunguishing between the two disciplines (see previous post), the bulk of his discussion focuses on the potential for collaboration between the two fields in three particular areas.

Graphemics
A major point of difference in this field has been that ANE philologists work with texts (of dead languages) whereas linguists traditionally work with speech. For many linguists, writing is a "secondary representation of speech."
Nonetheless, other linguists view writing as "an autonomous expression of language and a proper object of linguistic analysis" (p. 43). That is, writing is just as worthy of linguistic study as speech as a unique representation of language.
Philologists, according to Bodine's differntiation, are generally interested in what languages reveal about the culture and, as such, have not spent much time relating writing to language or writing to speech. Thus, linguists who do recognize writing as a representation of language differentiated from speech and "primary linguistic data" can bring to the discussion their "expertise in theoretical and methodological aspects of analysis, often introducing questions and approaches which would not occur otherwise to the philologian" (p. 44). Philologists could then bring their specialized knowledge of the language and literature thereby bringing with such expertise the means to a greater degree of analysis and authenticity.

Translation Theory and Methodology
Discussions of translation method have a tendency to produce heated arguments. Linguists, whose main concern is communication, generally focus upon bringing the message of the source language's text to the context of the target language. They focus upon "meaning" more than "surface structure." For some linguists, a desire for a "literal" translation is not only simplistic, but also problematic in that meaning is then lost in the target language.
Philologists, on the other hand, feel that the true meaning of the text is directly tied to the surface structure, particularly in literary contexts. "Meaning is inseparable from form" (p. 49). "An idiomatic approach may extract the bare information and express it accurately in a newly formulated translation, but strategic dimensions of meaning will have been lost with the original literary form which has been stripped away" (p. 49).
Bodine proposes a modification of Nida and Tabor's approach: "transfer from the source to the target language must not be visualized as taking place on the level of meaning alone, but must also reckon with the relationship of form and meaning in the source text and in the target language and must face the tensions that a transfer from the one complex to the other entails" (p. 50).
In any case, ideal translation is probably impossible as no matter what approach is taken, either meaning or form is sacrificed to some extent (of course, the solution may be to force everyone to learn ancient languages . . . ). Pragmatically, however, translations should likely take into account the purpose of the translation and the targeted audience, perhaps alternating between a more literal and a more idiomatic approach as necessary. Moreover, the translator(s) should work to interact with his disciplinary counterpart, appreciating a different perspective and allowing such dialogue to guide her translation.

Discourse Analysis
Here is a field which Bodine deems "holds perhaps the most obvious potential for fruitful dialogue across these fields" (p. 51). Historically, general linguistics has been primarily concerned with language at the sentence level or smaller (clauses, words, morphemes, phonemes, phones, etc.). Thus, for linguists, the field is (was) relatively unfamiliar. Conversely, since philologists study the texts as texts, they are familiar with approaches beyond the sentence level (literary criticism, rhetorical criticism, structural analysis, etc.). Here again is a field to which linguists can provide a more technical methodology and philologists expertise. Additionally, philologists can bring to the fore "experience" with handling larger bodies of text and linguists can bring a fresh perspective.
(note: much progress has been made here in the last 20 years on both sides).

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From what I have observed, the last 20 years has seen a great deal of interaction between linguistics and philology. Nonetheless, many philologists remain somewhat suspect of linguistic methodologies. Overall, the field of ancient studies (biblical studies in particular) has made progress in adopting linguistic approaches to its analysis of texts and languages, and such has provided new insights for interpretation of both the languages with which we work and the cultures which they portray. However, it seems as though there is still a great deal that linguistics can offer to philology, particularly in Assyriology since many Assyriologists have yet to incorporate the discipline in their research. Additionally, while linguistics can potentially provide new perspectives, questions, and answers, an improper methodology can undermine the entire process . . . but more on that later . . .