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August Schleicher (1821–1868)

Schleicher drew the first family tree of languages, in 1853, six years before the Origin of Species, and made the reconstruction of the Indo-European parent language a method rather than a hope. He held that languages are natural organisms, which arise, grow to maturity and decline according to laws independent of the will of their speakers, and he took that picture first from Hegel and then, after 1859, found it confirmed by Darwin. His open letter to Ernst Haeckel, Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft (1863), argued that linguistics already had what Darwin lacked, an actual pedigree of descent built from evidence, and Darwin cited its English translation in The Descent of Man (1871), on the origin of language.

August Schleicher was born on 19 February 1821 in Meiningen, the son of a physician who had helped found the first student Burschenschaft at Jena in 1815. He began in theology at Leipzig in 1840, moved to Tübingen, where he read Hegel and learned Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit and Persian, and in 1843 went to Bonn to study classical philology under Friedrich Ritschl and Friedrich Welcker, taking his doctorate in 1846. A stipend arranged by Prince Georg of Saxe-Meiningen let him travel from 1848 to 1850; in Paris and Vienna he worked in the libraries and wrote reports on the revolutions for the German press, with liberal-democratic sympathies. Prague appointed him extraordinary professor of classical philology in 1850 and in 1853 ordinary professor of comparative linguistics, German and Sanskrit. In 1852 he spent half a year among Lithuanian speakers in East Prussia, which gave him his Handbuch der litauischen Sprache (1856–57), the first scientific grammar of the language. In 1857 he moved to Jena, where he felt isolated until the zoologist Ernst Haeckel arrived in 1861 and became his close friend; August Leskien, later a founder of the neogrammarian school, was among his students. A serious gardener all his life, he died in Jena on 6 December 1868, apparently of tuberculosis.

Key concepts

The family tree. Comparative philology since William Jones and Franz Bopp had established that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic and the rest were related. Schleicher gave the relation a shape. In “Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes” (1853) he drew the Indo-European languages as the branches of a tree splitting from a common stem, and by Die deutsche Sprache (1860) the tree was his standard device. The model, later called the Stammbaumtheorie, treats a language family as a genealogy: each language descends from one parent by splitting, and relationship is shared descent.

Reconstruction. The Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (1861–62) was the first comparative grammar to set out the forms of the parent language itself, reconstructed from the regular correspondences among its daughters. Schleicher is credited with the convention of marking such unattested forms with an asterisk, and in 1868 he published a short fable, “The Sheep and the Horses” (Avis akvāsas ka), written entirely in reconstructed Indo-European, to show what the method could produce. Its forms have been rewritten many times since, as reconstruction has changed.

Languages as natural organisms. For Schleicher, linguistics was a natural science and its object a natural organism. His first books, Zur vergleichenden Sprachengeschichte (1848) and Die Sprachen Europas (1850), sorted languages by structure into three types, isolating, agglutinating and inflecting, which he compared to crystals, plants and animals, and read the three as stages in the self-realisation of spirit in Hegel’s sense. Languages grow in a prehistoric period, reaching their fullest forms before history begins, and decline once history starts, as the energy that built them goes into states, law and thought; Greek and Latin are richer in forms than the languages descended from them. The picture is one of growth, maturity and decay, and it is older than his reading of Darwin.

The letter to Haeckel. Haeckel urged him to read the German translation of the Origin, and the open letter of 1863 was his answer. Its translator, Heinrich Bronn, had objected that Darwin showed only that descent was possible, not that it had happened. Schleicher replied that language descent was established fact: Darwin’s only diagram of descent was an abstract scheme of lettered branches, while he appended to the letter a tree of real languages built from evidence. He added that languages leave far more fossils than organisms, in written records; that their competition and extinction matched the struggle Darwin described; and that more complex languages had grown from simple roots. An English translation, Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language, appeared in 1869, and Haeckel took the tree into his own work.

Language and the natural history of man. In Über die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen (1865) Schleicher argued that humans became human in acquiring language, that language rather than skull form was the proper criterion for classifying human groups, and, since he held that languages arose separately in many places, that human groups had separate origins too. Ranking languages by his typology, he placed the Indo-European and Semitic groups highest. Darwin read the argument through Haeckel.

Where Schleicher stops

The tree admits change only by splitting. His student Johannes Schmidt’s Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen (1872) answered it with the wave model, in which innovations spread from dialect to dialect across a continuum and neighbouring languages share features without a common split, and the two pictures have been set against each other since.

The organism is where his critics pressed hardest. The American linguist William Dwight Whitney held that languages are institutions, made and changed by their speakers, and in “Schleicher and the Physical Theory of Language” (1871) rejected the claim that language made man: “Man was man before the development of speech began”. The neogrammarians, Leskien among them, dropped the organism and the law of decay and located change in individual speakers, governed by exceptionless sound laws. Saussure’s Cours recalled the period in which language “was considered a specific sphere, a fourth natural kingdom”. In the field’s later accounts the tree and the reconstructed parent language are what lasted of his work; the organism with its life cycle was set aside.

Key works

See also: Evolution · Language change · Darwin · Hegel · Saussure