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Life
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).
Work
August Schleicher began his career studying theology and Oriental languages especially Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Persian. 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):
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.
Schleicher was an advocate of the polygenesis 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 biologist Ernst Haeckel.
Works by August Schleicher
1) 2. Rasmus Rask and their contribution to comparative philology.
Rasmus Rask, in full Rasmus Kristian Rask (born Nov. 22, 1787, Braendekilde, Den.—died Nov. 14, 1832, Copenhagen), Danish language scholar and a principal founder of the science of comparative linguistics. In 1818 he first showed that, in their consonant sounds, words in the Germanic languages vary with a certain regularity from their equivalents in the other Indo-European languages, e.g., the English father, acre, and the Latin pater, ager. What Rask observed proved to be the basis of a fundamental law of comparative linguistics (Grimm’s law), enunciated in 1822 by Jacob Grimm.
Rask began his long association with the University of Copenhagen as assistant keeper of the library in 1808, and in 1811 he published the first systematic grammar of Old Norse, published in an English translation in 1843. During a stay in Iceland that he spent in mastering the language and studying the literature, manners, and customs (1813–15), he wrote the work on which his fame rests, Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (1818; Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language). It was primarily an examination and comparison of the Scandinavian languages with Latin and Greek. Rask was the first to indicate that the Celtic languages, which include Breton, Welsh, and Irish, belong to the Indo-European family and also stated that Basque and Finno-Ugric do not. He established the relationship of Old Norse to Gothic and of Lithuanian to Slavic, Greek, and Latin.
Although he turned his attention mainly to Indic languages around 1816, he published the first Anglo-Saxon grammar in 1817 and edited two major works of Icelandic literature, the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda (1818). In 1816 he began travels that took him to Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and finally Iran. The Persian manuscripts he collected remain among the national treasures of Denmark. In 1820 he continued on to India and Ceylon. When he returned to Copenhagen in May 1823, he brought with him many manuscripts in Pāli, Sinhalese, and other languages. Subsequently, Rask was appointed professor of literary history (1825), university librarian (1829), and professor of Oriental languages (1831). His later works include grammars of Spanish (1824), Frisian (1825), and other languages. Over his lifetime Rask had mastered 25 languages and dialects and is reputed to have studied twice as many.
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