Linguistic language biography
August Schleicher: Darwinism and linguistics S. August Schleicher - called the languages “natural organisms educated from sound matter” Polyglot and traveler August Schleicher was born in the German city of Miningen in the family of a doctor. Already in the gymnasium years, he formed two seemingly incompatible hobbies with each other: botany and languages. At the same time, Schleicher was not the first student in the gymnasium, since he did not show proper zeal to study objects that were of little interest to him.
After the gymnasium, Schleicher entered the theological faculty of Leipzig University. After graduating from the first semester, he was disappointed and moved to the Tubingen University, from which he soon also left. In the end, Schleicher throwing ended at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bonn, which he graduated in the year. The brilliant abilities for languages in August Schleicher manifested themselves early.
At the gymnasium, he studied Latin, Greek and Jewish, also interested in Chinese and Sanskrit; in Leipzig - Arabic; In Bonn - German philology, again Sanskrit and Arabic. His beloved teacher at the University of Bonn was Friedrich Richl - an outstanding researcher of the history of the Latin language. Schleicher became one of the most active participants in the scientific seminar of Richl and fulfilled his doctoral dissertation for an exemplary modern analogue - candidate.
In the year, August Schleicher returned to Sonneberg, where his family lived. At the University of Bonn, he met another unusual student-Georg Saxen-Gildburgusensky-, the future Georg II, the penultimate Duke of Saxen-Meiningen. The young aristocrat not only offered a talented scientist his friendship, but also appointed him a generous scholarship. With this money, Schleicher went to travel, with years he conducted long research in Paris, London, Vienna.
From abroad he wrote correspondence for German newspapers to make some money. But these correspondence complicated his life for a long time. In his reports-for example, about the revolution of the year in France-he showed sympathy for the liberal-democratic faction of the Frankfurt National Assembly of the First General German Parliament. After that, the police of the Austrian Empire took him under observation.
In the same year, immediately after the university, Schleicher published his first major work on linguistics. Her plan was striking in the imagination: the author tried to analyze and identify the general trends in the evolutionary change of some sounds in a large number of rather distant Greek, Sanskrit, ancient Persian, Latin, Gothic, Lithuanian, Irish, Hungarian, Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese and some others.
This work, the second part of which was published in the year, created Schleiger a name in the scientific world. In the year, he was offered the position of Professor Prague University of the Czech Republic at that time was part of the Austrian Empire. Schleicher went to Prague and quickly mastered the Czech language.
Studies of the oldest monuments of Slavic writing led him to the creation of the “theory of forms of the Church Slavonic language”-the very concept of “church-Slavic language” in this work appears for the first time. Later, he will become a foreign corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and will begin work on several works in the Slavic and Baltic languages, but early death will prevent him from finishing them.
The Lithuanian language was the next object of interests of Schleicher - among the Baltic languages it is distinguished by archaic features and is considered closer to their common ancestor than others. It traces even more ancient vocabulary - Indo -European origin. In the year, Schleicher received a scholarship of the Vienna Academy of Sciences and went to East Prussia for research by the Lithuanian language.
There he stayed for six months - and learned to speak fluently in Lithuanian. Due to the persecution of the police, as well as, perhaps due to the deterioration of health in the year, August Schleicher returns to Sonneberg. In his homeland, he continues field research and first describes the local Izgrund dialect of the German language, which still fascinates linguists. In the year, Augustus Schleicher proposed a place for the professor of the Philosophy Faculty of Jena University.
With this purpose, he associated great hopes, but the conservatism of the local professors made a repulsive impression on him. Both the scientific and political views of Schleicher forced him to loneliness. However, it was in Jena that he came close to Ernst Haeckel -, the great German naturalist and philosopher. From the year, friendly relations have been established between Schleicher and Haeckel.
With him, Schleicher could talk about what excited him as a linguist - about evolution. A living language so that the reader is able to understand the meaning of the work of Schleicher, you should tell something from the history of linguistics. Already in the XVII century, thinkers noted the similarities between some languages, at first glance far from each other.In the year, the British philologist Sir William Jones - drew attention to the similarity of English and German with Sanskrit and expressed an opinion about their general origin.
In the year, the English physicist, the doctor and linguist Thomas Jung, who introduced the term “Indo -European languages”, came to a similar conclusion. The justice of this conclusion was finally proved in the work of the German linguist, the founder of the comparative linguistics of Franz Bopp, published in the year. Inside the Indo -European languages, groups of related languages of a lower level were distinguished.
So, in the year, the Russian philologist-Slavist and poet Alexander Vostokov-introduced the idea of the Slavic languages, which once descended from a single ancient Slavic language. A little later, Frederick Christian Dits - came to the same conclusion regarding Romanesan languages. The features of kinship were also revealed outside the Indo -European languages. So, the idea of Finno-Ugric languages as a single group connected by a common origin began to form in the 18th century.
And in the year, the Finnish linguist Matthias Karsn-put forward the hypothesis of the kinship of Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages. Thus, in the first half of the 19th century, a systematics of languages were built, strikingly resembling biological systematics. Both that and the other used the principle of invested groups. Inside one group there were several groups of smaller levels, and inside each of them - a group of even smaller level.
Classes were distinguished inside the types, inside the classes - detachments, inside the detachments - family, inside the families - childbirth, inside the birth - species. The domestic cat belongs to the kingdom of animals, the type of chordovovs, the subtype of the vertebrates, the class of mammals, the predatory detachment, the cat family and the family of cats. And the Russian language is to the Macro -Emue of Nostratic languages, the family of Indo -European languages, branches of Slavic languages and a group of East Slavic languages.
The position of the type and language in the system is an address at which you can easily find a classified item. In the same way, the address of a person allows him to easily deliver him a letter. If we know that citizen Ivanov Sidor Karpovich lives in the Moscow region, in the Kashirsky district, in the city of the necklace, on Sovetskaya Street, in house 24 and apartment 15, then the mail will easily deliver the letter addressed to him.
However, the classification of citizens so convenient for postal workers by postal addresses is slightly different from the classification of biological species and human languages. Behind the classification of citizens there are no related relationships between them. And for biological and linguistic classifications - they stand. At least ideally. Biological classification was formed earlier than the classification of languages.
But linguists had previously realized that there are kinship and history behind this classification. Evolutionary ideas were implicitly ripened in biology since the 18th century, however, counteraction to these ideas was very strong before the theory of Darwin and even after. In the linguistics of strong resistance to evolutionary ideas, apparently, there was no, but the classification of languages was much less perfect.
Ernst Haeckel - the famous German naturalist and philosopher, was a friend of Schleicher in the year, the book of Charles Darwin “The Origin of Species and Natural Selection” appears, leading a strong scientific basis to previously vague ideas about biological evolution. This book has become the most important prerequisite for the revolution in biological systematics and in the systematics of languages.
The leader of this revolution in biology was Ernst Geckel, the leader of the revolution in linguistics - August Schleicher. The essence of their ideas was that the variety of species and a variety of languages can be portrayed in the form of a multiple branching tree, the consistent branching of which reflects family ties between the "branches". Schleicher wrote: “All the languages that we trace for a long time give the basis for the conclusion that they are in a constant and continuous change.
Languages, these natural organisms formed from sound matter, moreover, the highest of all, show their properties of the natural organism not only that they are all classified into birth, species, subspecies, etc. He proposed an understanding of the language as a living organism: just as an animal or plant, a tongue is born, reaches maturity, gives offspring and dies. This was not just a beautiful comparison, but a new and fruitful research approach.
How to write a fable in a forgotten language, in contrast to most of the contemporary linguists, August Schleicher knew biology well and read biological scientific literature. After all, he was not only a linguist, but also a good, although not professional botanist. This allowed him to understand that biology and linguistics are faced with the same problems. Having formulated the idea of the fundamental similarity of biological evolution and the evolution of languages, he proposed to build a classification of languages according to the same principle as the classification of biological species.
This classification was based on the idea that new languages are formed as a result of the sequential separation of old ones.An alternative point of view suggested that a merging of two or more old ones can play an important role in the emergence of new languages. This point of view was held, in particular, the outstanding Soviet linguist Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr - the study of the history of specific languages showed, however, that the emergence of a new language as a result of the merger of the old ones is rare, although, of course, borrowing words from other languages are quite common.
Similar problems are solved by biology. Today we know that there is the possibility of transferring genetic material between distant species. The meaning of this phenomenon for evolution as a whole remains not quite clear, but, apparently, such a transfer plays an important role in evolution, therefore, on evolutionary trees of bacteria or archaea, the twigs not only diverge, but also grow together.
Schleicher understood that his considerations about the divergence of languages would look much more significant if he reinforces them with actual evidence of how the ancestor languages of large groups of modern languages looked. And he set himself a daring task: to restore the now -not existing language that lay at the founding of the whole family of Indo -European languages.
It is clear that no written monuments of this language existed. Of course, there were no people who speak this language. The only method of reconstruction of the language was a comparative analysis of famous Indo -European languages, which allows to identify their similar features. In biology, this problem was solved by one of the classics of comparative anatomy Richard Owen - he was a fundamental opponent of evolutionary representations and generally differed in piety.
Owen believed that every systematic group of living organisms was based on a certain divine idea, which he called an archetype. In really existing species, childbirth, families, etc. So, Owen calculated the archetype of vertebrates, which, apparently, resembled their common ancestor. Of course, for Owen himself the last statement was absolutely unacceptable. But back to linguistics.
Related languages are similar to grammar and in the dictionary. So, the Russian word "brother" to Sanskrit is translated as "bharat."