In times of epochal transformations, change happens gradually. The only place where you can observe dramatic change is the language. That is why philologists are the first to notice it. Others only begin to notice when it’s too late.
Arkady Belinkov.
Philologists and Change
Clarissa's Blog 
I think that by “philologists” he means linguists. I suppose that people with a linguistic sensibility are more attuned to this kind of changes.
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He uses the word “языковед”, which in a literal translation would be “the knower of language.” I vacillated between linguist and philologist because the word “linguist” has been murdered by the higher education system in America. People who market themselves as linguists in academia are usually specialists on the pedagogy of language teaching.
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Thanks for clearing this up. The beauty of “языковед” is that it is perspicuous in a way that neither linguist nor philologist is.
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There is this beautiful shade of difference between языковедение and языкознание. Ведать is not the same as знать. It’s one of those things that are very hard to relay in translation.
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