4. August Schleicher (1821-68). Schleicher's un-
usually complex views cannot be accurately described
in brief compass. Here we are concerned only with
his relation to uniformitarianism (cf. Hoenigswald
[1963]; [1966], pp. 1-2 and n. 13; Jespersen [1922],
pp. 71-83; Maher [1966]; Oertel [1902], pp. 39-42,
53-54, 58-59; Pedersen [1931], Ch. 10 and pp. 311-13;
Robins [1967], pp. 178-82; Schmidt [1890]).
Schleicher's work (1863) on Darwinism and linguis-
tics is interestingly like Lyell's work of the same year
in its comparison of languages with biological species.
Schleicher says that whether or not Darwin's natural-
selection hypothesis is true of species, it is certainly
true of languages. This is far from entitling us to call
Schleicher a Darwinian, but at least there is a measure
of agreement.
On the other hand, Schleicher was no uniformitarian.
Employing a certain interpretation of Hegel's contrast
between Spirit (which expresses itself in History) and
Nature, he eclectically combined it with the pre-
Hegelian, eighteenth-century opinion that the his-
torically attested language changes are deteriorations,
or forms of decay; he posited an earlier stage of lan-
guage in which languages were perfected, and a later
stage during which they deteriorated; because only the
earlier stage involves Spirit, he assigned it to History
(in the Hegelian sense), with the result—confusing to
us today—that his stage of History is prehistoric and
his stage of Nature includes all the historically docu-
mented changes. Now obviously any such contrast
between a stage of History and a stage of Nature in
language is intensely un-uniformitarian. It is one thing
to simply say nothing about prehistoric languages, i.e.,
to limit the scope of one's consideration to the histori-
cally documented languages, and another thing to
make a positive claim, as Schleicher did, about prehis-
torical “History.” We shall now see the reaction in the
1860's and '70's to this claim. In leaving Schleicher,
let us remark as a last point that one of his major
contributions—the family-tree model of relationships
within a language-family—had an un-uniformitarian
tinge, insofar as it committed itself to treating the split
of one language into two as a sudden, cleancut separa-
tion, contrary to what we observe today as the ordi-
nary, hardly observable process of language-change
(Bloomfield [1933], pp. 347, 364, 394, 481). A few years
after Schleicher, a more realistic model was proposed
by his pupil Johannes Schmidt (Pedersen [1931], pp.
314-15; Bloomfield [1933], pp. 317-18, 340).
