August Schleicher

August Schleicher (February 19, 1821 - December 6, 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.

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August Schleicher was born in Meiningen (Duchy Saxe-Meiningen, southwest of Weimar in the Thuringian Forest).

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He began his career studying theology and Indo-European, especially Slavic languages. 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 ?bersicht (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. To show how Indo-European might have looked he created a short tale, Schleicher's fable, to exemplify both words and known culture. 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. 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. August Schleicher died from tuberculosis in age of 47 in Jena (Duchy Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Thuringia).

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February 19: February 19 is the 50th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 315 days remaining, 316 in leap years....

1821: 1821 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar)....

December 6: December 6 is the 340th day (341st on leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 25 days remaining....

August Schleicher related Images and Photos (experimental)

August	August Rush (BD)	August Morning	August Evening
August Sunflowers	August Rush (WS/FS/DVD)	August Afternoon Paris	August Afternoon Paris
"Lawn Party " August 1 1974	August in the City	August Blue circa 1911	"Surf Swimming " August 14 1948