August Schleicher
Honorary academician
German linguist who helped turn the comparison of Indo-European languages into the reconstruction of their shared past.
- Life
- 1821–1868
- Field or role
- Comparative linguistics and Indo-European reconstruction
August Schleicher (1821–1868) was a German linguist whose work helped establish the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European as a central undertaking of comparative linguistics. He studied the relationships among the Indo-European languages and sought to describe the earlier forms from which their recorded grammars had developed.
His Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages brought together a substantial body of comparative knowledge. He also used branching family trees to represent linguistic descent.
In 1868, Schleicher published a short fable about a sheep and horses in reconstructed Indo-European. Its language has since been revised many times as reconstruction has advanced. The attempt remains memorable: a grammar assembled from comparisons was made to tell a story.
The Danetian Academy honors Schleicher for helping scholars ask what an unrecorded language might have been like. For a language built with an Indo-European past, his work belongs close to home.