Schleicher, August

Schleicher, August (ou`gst shlī`khər), 1821–68, German philologist. A professor at the universities of Prague and Jena, Schleicher wrote studies of the Lithuanian language (1856–57), the German language (1860), and the language of the Polabian Slavs (1871). His most important work on comparative philology, published in German (1861–62), was translated as A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin Languages (2 vol., 1874–77).

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Schleicher, August

(born Feb. 19, 1821, Meiningen, Saxe-Meiningen—died Dec. 6, 1868, Jena, Prussia) German linguist. He began his career studying classical and Slavic languages. Influenced by G.W.F. Hegel and Charles Darwin, he formed the theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity, and decline. 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. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages (1874–77), in which he attempted to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European.