ABSTRACT
This chapter will describe the first of our core methods: the comparative method. Philology, comparative-historical linguistics, and historical linguistics represent a package of disciplines, grounded in strict methodologies. The methods have a relatively long history, going back to the philological method, outlined in the eighteenth century, the comparative-historical method, discovered in the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century observations of processes in historical linguistics, such as grammaticalization. The methodological baseline has not changed much since the nineteenth century, but the instruments have been improved through the field of digital humanities, and the amounts of data available have increased. After an initial overview of the history of the discipline, we will look at these methods one by one, first introducing them in their traditional outline and then demonstrating how they have changed through the introduction of digital humanities.
