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One branch of philology is historical linguistics. Similarities between Sanskrit and European languages were first noted in the early 18th century and led to the discovery of Proto-Indo-European. Philology's interest in ancient languages led to the study of what were in the 19th century "exotic" languages for the light they could cast on problems in understanding and deciphering the origins of older texts.

In the United States, the American Journal of Philology was founded in 1880 by Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, a professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University.

Philology also includes textual criticismTextual criticism is a branch of philology that examines the extant manuscript copies of an ancient or medieval literary work to produce a text that is as close as possible to the original. The original is called the autograph. Before the invention of pri, which tries to reconstruct an ancient author's original text based on manuscript copies. Higher criticismHigher criticism is a branch of philosophy that attempts to investigate the origin of a text, especially the text of the Bible. Higher criticism in particular focusses on the contributing sources of a document and determine the authorship, date, and place is the study of the authorship, date, and provenance of texts.

Another branch of philology is the deciphermentDecipherment is the analysis of documents written in ancient languages, where the language is unknown, or knowledge of the language has been lost. It is closely related to cryptanalysis — the difference being that the original document was not deliberatel of ancient writing systems, which had spectacular successes in the 19th century involving Egyptian and Assyrian. A list of decipherments:

• Jean-François ChampollionFor the comet rendezvous spacecraft, see Champollion (spacecraft). Jean-Francois Champollion ( December 23, 1790 March 4, 1832) is remembered particularly for one achievement: the translation of the Rosetta stone, which became the basis of the study of Eg published his decipherment of the Rosetta StoneThe Rosetta Stone is a dark granite stone (often incorrectly identified as " basalt") which provided modern researchers with translations of ancient text in Egyptian demotic script, Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Because Greek was well known, the ston in 1822.
• Michael VentrisMichael Ventris ( July 12, 1922 September 6, 1956) was an English architect and classical scholar, responsible for the decipherment of Linear B. At the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans began excavating Knossos, an ancient city deciphered Linear BLinear B is the script that was used for writing Mycenaean, an early form of the Greek language. It occurrs primarily on tablets dated from the 14th and 13th centuries BC. The script was derived from an earlier script ( Linear A) used for writing the Mino in the 1950s and tenatively confirmed that the Mycenaean language was early Greek. However, this conclusion is still heavily debated amongst philologists.
• Sir Henry Rawlinson deciphered the three cuneiform languages of the Behistun Inscription: Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian.
• Bedrich Hrozný deciphered Hittite in 1915.
• Decipherment of Maya language hieroglyphics has been a gradual process beginning at the end of the 19th century, with great progress made in the late 20th century and continuing today.
• Work continues on Minoan Linear A and Etruscan.

See also: Aramaic language, Volney prize