Contact Philology

The study of language contact lacked prestige in traditional Philology. In Europe and China, philologists partitioned the past into distinct national languages. This talk asks how historical interactions across languages became a rigorous modern research object. It revisits the early twentieth-century discovery of a Central Asian cave library of classical texts in Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, Semitic, and Turkic languages – and the broader transregional clash of colonial and anticolonial, capitalist and communist, politics through which linguistic experts made language contact meaningful.