Nineteenth-century philology turned racist hierarchies into scientific subject matter by tying language to race.

Evidence

Much of the racism in Schlegel’s strictures upon the Semites and other “low” Orientals was widely diffused in European culture. But nowhere else, unless it be later in the nineteenth century among Darwinian anthropologists and phrenologists, was it made the basis of a scientific subject matter as it was in comparative linguistics or philology. Language and race seemed inextricably tied, and the “good” Orient was invariably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the “bad” Orient lingered in present-day Asia, parts of North Africa, and Islam everywhere. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 274

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how comparative linguistics operationalized the good/bad Orient split — a key mechanism in Said’s toolkit.
• XREF: Connects to the Aryan myth literature (Poliakov) and later race-thinking readings in the Islamophobia module.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 274