August Schleicher

Philologist, born in Meiningen, C Germany. He studied at Tübingen University, taught classical philology and the comparative study of Greek and Latin at Prague (1850–7), and was professor at Jena (1857–68). Living among the peasants of Lithuania in 1852, he was the first to study an Indo-European language from speech. His major work is A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages (1861–2, trans title).

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. He 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. 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. by Konrad Koerner, Amsterdam, John Benjamins (1982) Formenlehre der kirchenslavischen Sprache. (1852) Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes. Allgemeine Zeitung fuer Wissenschaft und Literatur (August 1853) Handbuch der litauischen Sprache. (1st scientific compendium of Lithuanian language) (2 vols.) Weimar, H. Boehlau (1857) Volkstuemliches aus Sonneberg im Meininger Oberlande - Lautlehre der Sonneberger Mundart. Weimar, H. Boehlau (1858) Kurzer Abriss der Geschichte der italienischen Sprachen. Rheinisches Museum fuer Philologie 14.329-46. Cotta (1888) Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. (Kurzer Abriss der indogermanischen Ursprache, des Altindischen, Altiranischen, Altgriechischen, Altitalischen, Altkeltischen, Altslawischen, Litauischen und Altdeutschen.) (2 vols.) Weimar, H. reprinted by Minerva GmbH, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, ISBN 3-8102-1071-4 Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft - offenes Sendschreiben an Herrn Dr. Ernst Haeckel. Weimar, H. Boehlau (1863) Die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen. Weimar, H. Hotten (1869) Laut- und Formenlehre der polabischen Sprache. reprinted by Saendig Reprint Verlag H. Wohlwend, ISBN 3-253-01908-X Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen. reprinted by Minerva GmbH, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, ISBN 3-8102-1072-2 Die Formenlehre der kirchenslavischen Sprache erklaerend und vergleichend dargestellt. Reprint by H. Sein Leben und Werk in der Sicht der Indogermanistik. Berlin, Akademie Verlag (1966) Konrad Körner: Linguistics and evolution theory (Three essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Bleek). Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company (1983) Liba Taub: Evolutionary Ideas and "Empirical" Methods: The Analogy Between Language and Species in the Works of Lyell and Schleicher. British Journal for the History of Science 26, S.