August Schleicher
August Schleicher (German: [ˈaʊɡʊst ˈʃlaɪçɐ];[2][3] 19 February 1821 – 6 December 1868) was a German linguist. Schleicher studied the Proto-Indo-European language and devised theories concerning historical linguistics. 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. 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.
August Schleicher
19 February 1821
6 December 1868 (aged 47)
Life[edit]
Schleicher was born in Meiningen, in the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, southwest of Weimar in the Thuringian Forest. He died from tuberculosis at the age of 47 in Jena, in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, in present-day Thuringia.
Linguistic theories[edit]
Tree model[edit]
Schleicher helped popularize the tree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) of historical linguistics, a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree diagram, particularly a phylogenetic tree of the biological evolution of species. 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 same language family.[10][11]
The tree model has been a common method of describing genetic relationships between languages since the first attempts to do so. It is important for comparative linguistics, which involves using evidence from known languages and observed rules of linguistic evolution to identify and describe the hypothetical proto-languages ancestral to each language family, such as Proto-Indo-European and the Indo-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 from loanwords to patois languages that have multiple parent languages.[10] The wave model was developed in 1872 by Schleicher's student Johannes Schmidt as an alternative to the tree model that incorporates geographic diffusion.[12]
The tree model also has the same limitations as biological taxonomy with respect to the species problem of quantizing a continuous phenomenon that includes exceptions like ring species in biology and dialect continua in language. The concept of a linguistic linkage 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.[11]
Comparative model[edit]
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common 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 of internal reconstruction in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that language.[13] 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 scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Verner and the German scholar Jacob Grimm.
The first linguist to offer reconstructed forms from a proto-language was Schleicher, in his Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, originally published in 1861.[14] Here is Schleicher's explanation of why he offered reconstructed forms:[15]