August Schleicher | |
|---|---|
 Schleicher as drawn byFriedrich Kriehuber | |
| Born | (1821-02-19)19 February 1821 |
| Died | 6 December 1868(1868-12-06) (aged 47) |
| Known for |
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August Schleicher (German:[ˈaʊɡʊstˈʃlaɪçɐ];[1][2] 19 February 1821 – 6 December 1868) was a Germanlinguist. Schleicher studied theProto-Indo-European language and devised theories concerning historical linguistics. His great work wasA Compendium of the ComparativeGrammar of theIndo-European Languages in which he attempted to reconstruct theProto-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 inMeiningen, in theDuchy of Saxe-Meiningen, southwest ofWeimar in theThuringian Forest. He died fromtuberculosis at the age of 47 inJena, in theDuchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, in present-dayThuringia.
Schleicher was educated at theUniversity of Tübingen andBonn and taught at theCharles University in Prague and theUniversity of Jena. He began his career studying theology andOriental languages, especiallyArabic,Hebrew,Sanskrit andPersian. Combining influences from the seemingly opposed camps of scientific materialism and the idealist philosophy ofGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he developed the theory that alanguage is anorganism, with periods of development, maturity and senescence.[3] Languages begin relatively simply. The state of primitive simplicity is followed by a period of growth and increased complexity, which eventually slows and results in 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 describingEuropean languages,Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht (The Languages of Europe in Systematic Perspective). He explicitly represented languages as natural organisms that could most conveniently be described using terms drawn frombiology –genus,species, andvariety – and arranged languages into aStammbaum (family tree). He first introduced a graphic representation of aStammbaum in an article published in 1853 entitledDie ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes. By the time of the publication of hisDeutsche Sprache (German language) (1860) he had begun to use tree diagrams to illustrate language development. Schleicher is commonly recognized as the first linguist to portray language evolution using the figure of atree. Largely in reaction,Johannes Schmidt later proposed his 'Wave Theory' as an alternative model.
Schleicher is the author of the first scientificCompendium ofLithuanian language, which was published in German in 1856/57.[4][5] Schleicher asserted that the Lithuanian language can compete with theGreek andRoman (Old Latin) languages in perfection of forms.[6]
Schleicher was an advocate of thepolygenesis of languages. He reasoned as follows (1876:2):
To assume one original universal language is impossible; there are rather many original languages: this is a certain result obtained by the comparative treatment of the languages of the world which have lived till now. Since languages are continually dying out, whilst no new ones practically arise, there must have been originally many more languages than at present. The number of original languages was therefore certainly far larger than has been supposed from the still-existing languages.
Schleicher's ideas on polygenesis had long-lasting influence, both directly and via their adoption by the biologistErnst Haeckel.[7] Ernst Haeckel was a German evolutionist and zoologist known for proposing thegastraea hypothesis.[8]
In 1866,August Leskien, a pioneer of research intosound laws, began studying comparative linguistics as a student of August Schleicher at the University of Jena.
Schleicher helped popularize thetree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) ofhistorical linguistics, a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of afamily tree diagram, particularly aphylogenetic tree of thebiological evolution ofspecies. As with species, each language is assumed to have evolved from a single parent language, with languages that share a common ancestor belonging to the samelanguage family.[9][10]
The tree model has been a common method of describinggenetic relationships between languages since the first attempts to do so. It is important forcomparative linguistics, which involves using evidence from known languages and observed rules of linguistic evolution to identify and describe the hypotheticalproto-languages ancestral to each language family, such asProto-Indo-European and theIndo-European languages. However, this is largely a theoretical, qualitative pursuit, and linguists have always emphasized the inherent limitations of the tree model due to the large role played by geographic diffusion ("horizontal transmission") in language evolution, ranging fromloanwords topatois languages that have multiple parent languages.[9] Thewave model was developed in 1872 by Schleicher's studentJohannes Schmidt as an alternative to the tree model that incorporates geographic diffusion.[11]
The tree model also has the same limitations as biological taxonomy with respect to thespecies problem ofquantizing a continuous phenomenon that includes exceptions likering species in biology anddialect continua in language. The concept of a linguisticlinkage was developed in response and refers to a group of languages that evolved from a dialect continuum rather than from linguistically isolated child languages of a single language.[10]
Inlinguistics, thecomparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages withcommon descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor. The comparative method may be contrasted with the method ofinternal reconstruction in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that language.[12] Ordinarily, both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages; to provide information missing about the historical record of a language; to discover the development of phonological, morphological and other linguistic systems and to confirm or to refute hypothesised relationships between languages. The comparative method was developed during the 19th century. Major contributions were made by the Danish scholarsRasmus Rask andKarl Verner and the German scholarJacob Grimm.
The first linguist to offer reconstructed forms from aproto-language was Schleicher, in hisCompendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, originally published in 1861.[13] Here is Schleicher's explanation of why he offered reconstructed forms:[14]
In the present work an attempt is made to set forth the inferredIndo-European original language side by side with its really existent derived languages. Besides the advantages offered by such a plan, in setting immediately before the eyes of the student the final results of the investigation in a more concrete form, and thereby rendering easier his insight into the nature of particularIndo-European languages, there is, I think, another of no less importance gained by it, namely that it shows the baselessness of the assumption that the non-Indian Indo-European languages were derived from Old-Indian (Sanskrit).
Schleicher's fable is a text composed in a reconstructed version of theProto-Indo-European (PIE) language, published by Schleicher in 1868. Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a text in PIE. The fable is entitledAvis akvāsas ka ("The Sheep [Ewe] and the Horses [Eoh]"). At later dates, various scholars have published revised versions of Schleicher's fable, as the idea of what PIE should look like has changed over time. The fablemay serve as an illustration of the significant changes that the reconstructed language has gone through during the last 150 years of scholarly efforts.
