August Schleicher was a German linguist.

His great work was A Compendium of the

Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages in which he attempted to reconstruct
the Proto-Indo-European language. To show how Indo-European might have looked, he created
a short tale, Schleicher's fable, to exemplify the reconstructed vocabulary and aspects of Indo-
European society inferred from it.
He began his career studying theology and Oriental languages, especially Arabic, Hebrew,
Sanskrit and Persian. Combining influences from the seemingly opposed camps of scientific
materialism and the idealist philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he formed the
theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity and decline.[5]
Languages start out simpler than they will become. The state of primitive simplicity is followed
by a period of growth, which eventually slows and gives way to a period of decay
Schleicher was an advocate of the polygenesis of languages. He reasoned as follows (1876:2):
To assume one original universal language is impossible; there are rather many original
languages: this is a certain result obtained by the comparative treatment of the languages of the
world which have lived till now. Since languages are continually dying out, whilst no new ones
practically arise, there must have been originally many more languages than at present. The
number of original languages was therefore certainly far larger than has been supposed from the
still-existing languages.
Schleicher played a pivotal role in devising theories in the field of historical linguistics, and in
the study of the Proto-Indo-European language. Schleicher had a key role in popularizing the
tree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) within the field of historical
linguistics; this is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family
tree, particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species. As with species,
each language is assumed to have evolved from a single parent or "mother" language, with
languages that share a common ancestor belonging to the same language family. [11][12] the
tree model has always been a common method of describing genetic relationships between
languages since the first attempts to do so.
It is central to the field of comparative linguistics, which involves using evidence from known
languages and observed rules of language feature evolution to identify and describe the
hypothetical proto-languages ancestral to each language family, such as Proto-Indo-European
and the Indo-European languages.
Comparative model
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages
by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent
from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor.
The comparative method may be contrasted with the method of internal reconstruction in which
the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that
language.