XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

August Schleicher, (born Feb. 19, 1821, Meiningen, Saxe-Meiningen – died Dec. 6, 1868, Jena, Thuringia), German linguist whose work in comparative linguistics was a summation of the achievements up to his time and whose methodology provided the direction for much subsequent research. He studied theology as well as classical and Slavic languages. He was influenced by the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, which he espoused during his student days at the University of Tübingen, and by pre-Darwinian biology. Ultimately, he aimed to devise a scientific theory of language based on principles of natural science.

From 1850 to 1857 Schleicher taught classical philology and the comparative study of Greek and Latin at the University of Prague. During this period he turned to the study of Slavic languages. In “Die Sprachen Europas”, Schleicher (1850: 1-5) introduces a distinction between ‘philology’ (Philologie), which treats language as a means to understanding the mental and cultural life of its speakers, and ‘linguistics’ (Linguistik), which has “language as such” (die Sprache als solche) as its object of study. Language as such is part of the “natural history of man” (Naturgeschichte des Menschen) and because of this the method of linguistics is “completely different from that of all historical sciences and essentially aligns itself with the method of the other natural sciences”. Like the other natural sciences, linguistics is based on ‘observation’ (Beobachtung) and deals with an area ruled by “unchangeable natural laws” (unabänderliche natürliche Gesetze).

The aspect of language most clearly subject to natural laws, according to Schleicher, is the ‘Formenlehre’, for which he adopts the term ‘Morphologie’ in his 1859 essay “Zur Morphologie der Sprache”. In this essay, he sets out a system of formulae for describing the full range of morphological structures exhibited in the world’s languages and in the process clearly circumscribes the limits of empirical scientific observation in linguistics. Morphology deals only with the “outer phonetic form of language” (äußere lautliche Form der Sprache).

In 1852 he began research on Lithuanian while living among the peasantry of Prussian Lithuania. This was the first attempt to study an Indo-European language directly from speech rather than from texts. His results appeared in the remarkable “Handbuch der litauischen Sprache” (1856-57; “Handbook of the Lithuanian Language”), the first scientific description and analysis of Lithuanian, complete with a grammar, reader, and glossary.

In the course of his professorship at the University of Jena (1857-68), he published many works, including the one on which his fame rests, “Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen” (partial trans., A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages, 1874-77), in which he studied the common characteristics of the languages and attempted to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European parent language, or ‘Ursprache’. Schleicher believed that language is an organism exhibiting periods of development, maturity, and decline. As such, it could be studied by the methods of natural science. Developing a system of language classification resembling a botanical taxonomy, he traced groups of related languages and arranged them into a genealogical tree. His model came to be known as the ‘Stammbaumtheorie’, or family-tree theory, and was a major development in the history of Indo-European studies or, more generally, in historical linguistic theory.

As with his treatment of functions, Schleicher did not so much exclude the historical development of forms in his ‘Morphologie’ essay as put it to one side. His morphological formulae were intended in the first instance to provide – in present-day parlance – a synchronic description of forms in languages without consideration of their history. But it was only against the background assumption that languages develop according to an overarching deterministic plan that individual forms could be characterized as belonging to specific types. This is clear in Schleicher’s popularizing 1860 “Deutsche Sprache”, which followed immediately after the ‘Morphologie’ essay, where Schleicher employs his formulae in a survey of morphological types in the world’s languages and sketches the universal laws of growth and decline that govern the evolution from type to type.

Three names that feature prominently in Schleicher’s (1863) essay “Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft” provide us with the means to triangulate his position in the contemporary intellectual landscape. The first two are those of Matthias Schleiden (1804–1881) and Carl Vogt (1817–1895), whose “Wissenschaftliche Botanik” (Schleiden 1842) and “Physiologische Briefe” (Vogt 1847) cites as his chief sources of instruction about Entwicklungsgeschichte; that is, developmental or evolutionary history. The third name is that of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), to whom the essay is dedicated: it was Haeckel who recommended Schleicher read Darwin’s Origin of Species in its first German translation (Darwin 1860 [1859]) and thereby prompted him to write the essay. All three of these names are deeply bound up with scientific materialism, a movement in 19th-century Germany centered around a reductionist biology that recognized only physical matter and mechanical forces and as a result rejected such traditional entities as vital forces, the mind and soul.

Exemplified in his “Wissenschaftliche Botanik”, among other texts, Schleiden’s pioneering work on cell theory served as an inspiration to materialism: taking advantage of the latest advances in microscopy, he formulated a sober, empirically minded account of the organism as a conglomeration of cellular machines. Schleiden was himself not averse to defending his empiricism and philosophical agnosticism against attacks from the rival romantic tradition of Naturphilosophie, although the later aggressive intrusion of scientific materialism into religious and political spheres was too much for him: later completely disavowed the movement.

Schleicher was steeped in this thought emanating from figures like Schleiden and Vogt and continued by Haeckel, in part through his own interests in the natural sciences, in particular botany, and in part through immediate personal contact. From childhood Schleicher had been a keen amateur botanist, an interest that was encouraged by his physician father. Schleicher commented himself that Haeckel most probably had his “horticultural and botanical hobbies” (gärtnerischen und botanischen Liebhabereien) in mind when he recommended reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, which Schleicher also reviewed from a horticultural perspective for the “Zeitschrift für deutsche Landwirthe”.

In his earliest works Schleicher’s philosophical allegiances seem to lie elsewhere. As observed in section 2 above, the key elements later criticized as constituting Schleicher’s materialist position, immanent laws of development and focus on outer form, were already present in his first book, the 1848 “Zur vergleichenden Sprachgeschichte”. But there Schleicher assimilates the notion of laws of development to the laws of history of the idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Koerner hypothesizes that Schleicher’s engagement with Hegel – in particular with Hegel’s Naturphilosophie — may have in fact stimulated his natural scientific thinking and helped him on his later course. This hypothesis is quite plausible: although the older Naturphilosophie was generally denounced by the champions of mechanistic science, they maintained many of its principles in modified form. Richards, for example, shows how teleological laws of development postulated in varieties of Naturphilosophie, in particular Goethe’s morphology, were reinterpreted by Haeckel in his general morphology as emergent properties of more fundamental mechanical laws. Schleicher’s natural laws of development in language make a similar migration from the ideal to the material realm with his shift from Hegel to natural scientific models.

Schleicher’s philosophical views are therefore the product of many different influences. However, he was still indisputably embedded in the contemporary movement of scientific materialism.

References:

Arbukle John, August Schleicher and the Linguistics/ Philology Dichotomy: A Chapter in the History of Linguistics, 2015 [online source] https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1970.11435578

Konrad Körner: Linguistics and evolution theory (Three essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Bleek). Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company (1983)

Liba Taub: Evolutionary Ideas and "Empirical" Methods: The Analogy Between Language and Species in the Works of Lyell and Schleicher. British Journal for the History of Science 26, p. 171–193 (1993)

McElvenny James, August Schleicher and Materialism in 19th-Century Linguistics, Historiographia Linguistica 45.1, August 2018, p. 133-52