As the previous article noted, Schleicher was a dedicated amateur botanist before he was a linguist. That background is the starting point of his whole view of language.
What does “lives” but has “no history” even mean?
Somewhere in his book, Schleicher flatly asserts: language “lives,” just as every natural organism lives. But because it doesn’t “act” the way a human does, language has no history — not, at least, if we use the word “history” in its strict, proper sense.
At first that sounds like a contradiction. How can something be “alive” and yet have “no history”?
It makes sense once you think like a botanist
Recall Schleicher’s other trade: botany. An oak tree is unquestionably alive. It sprouts, grows, spreads its branches, and eventually dies. But does an oak tree have a “history”? An oak doesn’t make choices, take decisions, or leave records of what it decided. It simply is born, grows, changes, and decays, following the natural laws built into it.
Schleicher held that language works the same way. The fact that humans “use” language doesn’t make language itself, like a human, an agent who “makes history.” Language change, in his view, is not the product of human will, politics, or cultural “history” — it is a biological process, following natural law, just like the growth of an oak tree. That is the core of his claim.
Why the distinction matters
This is not mere wordplay. If language change is “history” — the product of human will and social conditions — then studying it requires the tools of philology and historical scholarship. But if language change is a “biological process,” like an oak tree growing, then the study of language belongs to natural science, alongside botany and zoology, using the same kind of method.
This is exactly the move Schleicher brought into linguistics. The next article looks at a second, related claim that follows from this natural-scientific view of language: that language history is not “progress” but “development followed by decay.”
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Claim | Language “lives,” but has no “history” in the human sense |
| Grounding metaphor | A natural organism like an oak tree — it does not act with intention |
| Consequence | Language should be studied with the methods of natural science (botany, zoology) |
In a nutshell — for Schleicher, language change was not history that humans “make,” but an event nature “causes,” no different from an oak tree growing.