August Schleicher

Schleicher was born in Meiningen, in the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, southwest of Weimar in the Thuringian Forest.

He began his career studying theology and Oriental languages, especially Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Persian.

The state of primitive simplicity is followed by a period of growth and increased complexity, which eventually slows and results in a period of decay (1874:4): In 1850, Schleicher completed a monograph systematically describing European languages, Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht (The Languages of Europe in Systematic Perspective).

He first introduced a graphic representation of a Stammbaum in an article published in 1853 entitled Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes.

He reasoned as follows (1876:2): Schleicher's ideas on polygenesis had long-lasting influence, both directly and via their adoption by the biologist Ernst Haeckel.

Besides the advantages offered by such a plan, in setting immediately before the eyes of the student the final results of the investigation in a more concrete form, and thereby rendering easier his insight into the nature of particular Indo-European languages, there is, I think, another of no less importance gained by it, namely that it shows the baselessness of the assumption that the non-Indian Indo-European languages were derived from Old-Indian (Sanskrit).

At later dates, various scholars have published revised versions of Schleicher's fable, as the idea of what PIE should look like has changed over time.

The fable may serve as an illustration of the significant changes that the reconstructed language has gone through during the last 150 years of scholarly efforts.