New philology replaced divine language origin with heuristic protolanguages reconstructed by scholars

Evidence

The legacy of these first-generation philologists was, to Renan, of the highest importance, higher even than the work done by Sacy. Whenever he discussed language and philology, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of his long career, he repeated the lessons of the new philology, of which the antidynastic, anticontinuous tenets of a technical (as opposed to a divine) linguistic practice are the major pillar. For the linguist, language cannot be pictured as the result of force emanating unilaterally from God. As Coleridge put it, “Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.” The idea of a first Edenic language gives way to the heuristic notion of a protolanguage (Indo-European, Semitic) whose existence is never a subject of debate, since it is acknowledged that such a language cannot be recaptured but can only be reconstituted in the philological process. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 361

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core premise of the new philology: language as a technical, human reconstructible artifact rather than a divine gift.
• XREF: This anticontinuous, antidynastic view of language feeds directly into the later genealogical method (Foucault, Nietzsche) that Said’s biopolitics/necropolitics module depends on.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 361