August Schleicher
| August Schleicher | |
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August Schleicher, by Friedrich Kriehuber
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| Born | 19 February 1821 Meiningen, Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen (now in Thuringia, Germany) |
| Died |
6 December 1868 (aged 47) Jena, Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (now in Thuringia, Germany) |
| Alma mater | University of Bonn |
| School | Historicism |
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Main interests
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Indo-European studies |
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Influences
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Influenced
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| Signature | |
| Polygenesis of languages | |
August Schleicher (19 February 1821 – 6 December 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. 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 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.
Schleicher was educated at the University of Bonn and taught at the Charles University in Prague and the University of Jena.
He began his career studying theology and Oriental languages, especially Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Persian. Influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 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 European languages, 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: genus, species, and variety.
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