August Schleicher (February 19, 1821 – December 6, 1868) was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language. To show how Indo-European might have looked he created a short tale, Schleicher's fable, to exemplify the reconstructed vocabulary and aspects of Indo-European society inferred from it.
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August Schleicher was born in Meiningen (Duchy Saxe-Meiningen, southwest of Weimar in the Thuringian Forest). He died from tuberculosis at the age of 47 in Jena (Duchy Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Thuringia).
August Schleicher began his career studying theology and Indo-European, especially Slavic languages. Influenced by Hegel, he formed the theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity, and decline. In 1850 Schleicher completed a monograph systematically describing the languages of Europe, Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Übersicht (The languages of Europe in systematic perspective). He explicitly represented languages as perfectly natural organisms that could most conveniently be described using terms drawn from biology e.g., genus, species, and variety.
Schleicher claimed that he himself had been convinced of the natural descent and competition of languages before he had read Darwin’s Origin of Species. He invented a system of language classification that resembled a botanical taxonomy, tracing groups of related languages and arranging them in a genealogical tree. His model, the Stammbaumtheorie (family-tree theory), was a major development in the study of Indo-European languages. He first introduced a graphic representation of a Stammbaum in articles published in 1853. By the time of the publication of his Deutsche Sprache (German language) (1860) he had begun to use trees to illustrate language descent. Schleicher is commonly recognized as the first linguist to portray language development using the figure of a tree. Largely in reaction to this, Johannes Schmidt later proposed his 'Wave Theory' as an alternative model.
For the most part, however, Darwin’s ideas simply overlaid the fundamental features of Schleicher’s prior evolutionary project, which derived from the work of those individuals immersed in German romanticism and idealism especially Humboldt and Hegel.
Schleicher believed that languages pass through a life cycle, similar to that of living beings. To begin with, they were simpler than they would become. This state of primitive simplicity was followed by a period of growth, which eventually slowed, and then gave way to a period of decay (1874:4):
Schleicher was an advocate of the polygenesis of languages. He reasoned as follows (1876:2):
Schleicher's ideas on polygenesis had long-lasting influence, both directly and via their adoption by the biologist Ernst Haeckel.
"Schleicher,
August". Encyclopædia
Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
AUGUST SCHLEICHER (1821-1868), German philologist, was born at Meiningen on the 19th of February 1821, the son of a medical practitioner. He attended (1835-1840) the gymnasium at Coburg. In the autumn of 1840 he entered the university of Leipzig as a student of theology, but exchanged Leipzig in the spring of 1841 for Tubingen. Here he remained two years, and under the influence of the famous orientalist Ewald, relinquished the study of theology for that of languages. Proceeding to the university of Bonn in 1843, he took his doctor's degree in 1846 and established himself as Privatdozent for comparative philology. In 1850 he was appointed extraordinary professor of classical philology at the university of Prague, and in 1853 was advanced as ordinary' professor to the chair of German and comparative philology and Sanskrit. While at Prague he commenced the study of Slavonic languages, and with the assistance of the Vienna academy of sciences undertook in 1852 a journey of scientific research into Prussian Lithuania, the fruits of which were the first scientific examination and description of the character of the Lithuanian language. In 1857 he became professor of philology at Jena, where he lived and worked until his death on the 6th of December 1868. Next to Franz Bopp, the founder on the science of language, no German savant left a more enduring stamp of his personality upon this science than did Schleicher.
His first scientific work, Zur vergleichenden Sprachgeschichte (1848), was followed by Die Sprachen Europas (1850); but the book by which he is best known is Kompendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (2 pts., 1861, 1864; 4th ed., 1876), and a supplementary volume, Indogermanische Chrestomathie (1869). Among his minor writings are "Zur Morphologie der Sprache" (in the Memoires de l'academie de St. Petersbourg, 1859); Die Darwinsche Theorie and die Sprachwissenschaft (1863, new ed. 1873), Uber die Bedeutung der Sprache fiir die Naturgeschichte des Menschen (1865); while in the department of Slavonic and Lithuanian languages the following may be mentioned: Formenlehre der kirchenslavischen Sprache (1852); Handbuch der litauischen Sprache (with grammar, reader and glossary, 1856-1857). Besides Lithuanian legends he published an edition of Christian Donaleitis' Litauische Dichtungen (1865).
See S. Lefmann, August Schleicher (1870) and Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung, vol. xviii.
Categories: SAY-SCH | Linguists and lexicographers
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