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. August Schleicher was born in
Meiningen (
Duchy Saxe-Meiningen, southwest of
Weimar in the
Thuringian Forest). 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. To show how Indo-European might have looked he created a short tale,
Schleicher's fable, to exemplify both words and known culture. 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. 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. August Schleicher died from
tuberculosis at the age of 47 in
Jena (Duchy
Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach,
Thuringia).
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August Schleicher (
Meiningen, na
Turíngia,
19 de fevereiro de
1821 —
Jena,
6 de dezembro de
1868, antes de completar 48 anos) era um lingüista
alemão.Estudou
teologia,
filosofia e línguas orientais na Universidade de Leipzig e
Tübingen, tendo se especializado em
lingüística na
Universidade de Bonn. Obteve seu doutoramento em
1846, e passou a lecionar em
Praga e, a partir de
1857, em Jena. Em suas aulas, o foco de seus ensinos era a
gramática comparativa das línguas indo-européias.
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