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Concept
August Schleicher
Summary
August Schleicher (ˈaʊɡʊst ˈʃlaɪçɐ; 19 February 1821 – 6 December 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.
Schleicher was born in Meiningen, in the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, southwest of Weimar in the Thuringian Forest. He died from tuberculosis at the age of 47 in Jena, in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, in present-day Thuringia.
Schleicher was educated at the University of Tübingen and Bonn and taught at the Charles University in Prague and the University of Jena. He began his career studying theology and Oriental languages, especially Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Persian. Combining influences from the seemingly opposed camps of scientific materialism and the idealist philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he formed the theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity and decline. Languages start out simpler than they will become. The state of primitive simplicity is followed by a period of growth, which eventually slows and gives way to a period of decay (1874:4):
As man has developed, so also has his language (...): even the simplest language is the product of a gradual growth: all higher forms of language have come out of simpler ones.... Language declines both in sound and in form.... The transition from the first to the second period is one of slower progress.
In 1850, Schleicher completed a monograph systematically describing European languages, Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht (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 – genus, species, and variety – and arranged languages into a Stammbaum (family tree).
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