A Brill Calendar: December 6

August Sehleider and the Study of Language

Few linguists have been as seminal to the study of languages as August Schleicher, who died a University Professor in Jena, Prussia, on December 6, 1868, aged 67.

Everything achieved by earlier generations in the toil to compare languages to get an idea about language as such is summarized in his scholarly achievement; which also created a map for further study & research. Schleicher coined a new metaphor by comparing relations between languages as they were spoken in the Europe of his day with family-trees and genealogy - and without new metaphors there can be no innovation in thought. Schleicher’s ‘magnum opus’ is the ‘Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen’(1861 – ’62), studying common elements of existing languages and trying to trace them back to one Matriarchal source, an ‘Ursprache’, a primeval language.

Exactly 140 years after his death, comparative linguistics has given up hope, it would seem, to reconstruct such a single ‘Urheber’. Yet, this hardly detracts from Schleicher’s position in a linguistics hall of fame; particularly when his standing as field-worker in the discipline is taken into account. In his early thirties – then a professor of classical philology at the Charles University of Prague – he turned, quite surprisingly, to the study of Slavic languages and embarked on research of Lithuanian, an ancient and complex language that was still spoken although lacking an elaborate literary tradition.

Schleicher lived for a long time among illiterate peasants in the Lithuanian country-side under rather grim conditions – certainly for a city-dweller – before he could publish his ‘Handbuch der litauischen Sprache’; the first scientific exposure of an unparalleled Indo-European language. It is seldom that a linguist, exclusively honed in the tradition of classical antiquity during his personal education, expanded his domain of inquiry as fundamentally as August Schleicher did.