Maybe it’s a cultural thing. I think even your anglic preception of a scholar differs from my Gelehrter. When I look up philologus in my dictionary, it gives me .1. Gelehrter, 2. Philologe. The first “philologoi” were simply people who liked texts, like “philosophoi” liked thinking and being wise. Now, at the library of Alexandria, the “philologoi” were the scholars who emended and edited texts from Homer and the other poets to establish an original wording, kicking out additions by later poets. Then, the word stayed to designate people with interest in texts and books, quite generally, but also in a professional way. So when the treatment of historical texts with the goal to establish good editions became a thing again after the invention of the printing press, the philologists were again the people who established a text that one could print and publish to general use by scholars. And that’s what me and my colleagues still do, among other things.
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