A CRITICAL REVIEW OF
''ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LANGUAGE FOR THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN'' WRITTEN BY
AUGUST SCHLEICHER
In this short article I will try to assess the main ideas
expressed by Schleicher in his article ''On the Significance of Language.''
Before starting to review the article it is useful to give a
brief information about the author and the environment of him.
August Schleicher was born in 1821 and died in 1868. He was
a prominent German linguist who made a great contributions to linguistics. The
famous theory of him is ''Stammbaumtheorie'' (Family-tree theory) He wrote
famous ''Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European
Languages.'' He thought that language is an organism. That is, like any other
living organism language has periods of development, maturity and decline.
Affected by the biology and botanics he formulated that languages pass through
a life cycle like living things.
We can roughly divide linguistics into four periods:
Traditional Grammar, Historical Linguistics, Structuralism and Generative
Grammar. Schleicher was a linguist in Historical Linguistics period. In this
period language studies were highly affected by Darwinian theories and of
course biology. Language was seen as living things and languages were categorized
according to their typological differences or similarities. The sole aim was reaching proto languages.
Now let's have a look at the opinions which was given by
Schleicher in this article.
First of all he thinks that we cannot know where the language
comes from. It is a kind of mystery. But this does not impede us to study it.
We can study and analyze something that we cannot reach its source. He explains
this with two analogies. One is ''Organ Analogy'' and the other one is
''Chemistry Analogy'' In the former he states that we can know the function of
an organ even if we donot know the physical structure of that organ. In the
latter Schleicher says that chemists investigate sun's light but they cannot
directly take the source into their investigation. Similarly we cannot know the
origin of languages although there have been various hypothesis about it. But
origin of language is no longer debated in scientific circles because it is
needless. İn spite of this, throughout history language has been studied.
He adopts a geneological approach towards language. There
are a lot of proof regarding this claim. Firstly he alleges language
differences are the result of such minimal differences in the character of
brain and the speech organ. So we can infer that people speaking different
languages have different brains and speech organs. But with the help of
technology this has been proved wrong. MR and phonetic studies show that
between brains of speakers with different languages are same if there is no
damage or illness. There are just slight differences between vocalic properties
of sounds and phonology studies these vocalic differences in specific
languages. He also thinks that perfect mastering of second language is not
possible because speaker of different languages' brains are structured
differently. He gives an example of language families. Different people
belonging the different language family cannot speak each other's languages
with perfect mastering. But today we can see lots of, for instance, an Asian person
speaking English fluently and with ease. Or a German can speak Turkish or
Russian. Note that these languages belong to different language families.
He also asserts geography deeply affect one society's language. In here he can be
right to some extent. We can support this view by giving the so-called Eskimo
case. In Eskimo language there are lots of names for indicating snow. Because
in their environment they face with snow and cold. So that is a natural
process.
He divided human life into three periods: Development of
Physical Organs, Evolution of Language and Start of Historical life. Despite the lack of evidence it is plausible
to think that before speaking , vocal organs must have developed and with the
speaking of course we can start historical life because before that we nearly
donot know anything about the human life.
All in all, there are valid and invalid information about linguistics in Schleicher's article. But in his era thinking and putting forward these evaluations were very innovative. Schleicher and linguists like him paved the way for future linguistic analysis.
A CRITICAL REVIEW OF ''ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LANGUAGE FOR THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN'' WRITTEN BY AUGUST SCHLEICHER