The plain-language article introduced the claim that “language lives, but has no history.” Here we read that claim in the original German.
A single sentence, in a footnote
Schleicher didn’t state this claim in his main text at all — he tucked it into a short footnote.
die sprachen leben, wie alle naturorganismen; sie handeln nicht, wie der mensch, haben also auch keine geschichte, wofern wir dieses wort in seinem engeren und eigentlichen sinne fassen.
(Languages live, as all natural organisms do; they do not act, as man does — and therefore, if we take this word [history] in its narrower and proper sense, they have no history either.)
What’s worth noticing is that this sentence sits in a footnote, not the body text. For Schleicher, this wasn’t a bold new claim requiring elaborate argument — it was a fact so self-evident that a brief aside sufficed. That flat, declarative tone captures exactly the “practical student textbook” character discussed in the overview article.
A notation system for three stages of language
In the same introduction, Schleicher lays out a system classifying language types into three stages, each with a symbol of his own invention.
Es gibt 1. sprachen… isolierende sprachen; 2. sprachen… zusammenfügende sprachen; 3. sprachen, die die Wurzel selbst… verändern können: flectierende sprachen.
(There are three types of language: ① isolating languages, consisting only of unchangeable meaning-sounds; ② agglutinating languages, which attach relational sounds to these; and ③ inflecting languages, which change the root itself.)
Schleicher attaches an example to each type. The representative isolating language is Chinese; agglutinating languages are represented by the Finnic, Tatar, and Deccan languages; and inflecting languages — the class he says is “so far known” to include only two families — are the Semitic and Indo-Germanic. He then assigns each type its own symbol: the unchangeable meaning-sound of an isolating language is W; the relational sound an agglutinating language attaches to it is s (suffix), p (prefix), or i (infix); and the regular change to the root itself, in an inflecting language, is marked W’. In the original, he even runs a hypothetical comparison using this notation — noting that if Proto-Indo-European’s at-mi (corresponding to Greek εἰμί, “I am”) had instead taken a form like i-ma or i-mi, it would have remained at the agglutinating stage (Ws). This notation is more than an explanatory convenience — it recurs as the book’s working notation throughout the chapters that follow.
Linguistics that reads like a formula
The most distinctive feature of this classification is that Schleicher reduced language types to symbols, as if writing out a chemical or physical formula. An isolating language is W (the unchangeable root alone); an agglutinating language is W+s (a root with affixes “stuck on”); an inflecting language is W’ (the root itself changes in regular ways). This impulse to reduce the structure of language to an abstract notation is strikingly close to how a botanist sorts organisms into species, genus, and family, and organizes them under a system of scientific names.
The hierarchy hiding behind the symbols
At first glance, this notation looks like a neutral classification. But the progression itself — from W to W+s to W’ — is presented as a hierarchy of “development” from simple to complex, and that shouldn’t be missed. It lines up exactly with the “development followed by decay” framework from the plain-language article: inflecting languages (Semitic, Indo-European) stand, in Schleicher’s unstated assumption, at the very peak of linguistic development.
This kind of hierarchy was a widely shared habit of mind in nineteenth-century comparative linguistics, not a quirk unique to Schleicher. Treating an isolating language like Chinese as “the simplest stage” and an inflecting family like Indo-European or Semitic as “the most developed stage” was, to a greater or lesser degree, an assumption most European scholars of the period took for granted. That is exactly why this progression of symbols needs to be read with linguistic observation and period-bound value judgment kept carefully apart.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| First quote | Language lives as a natural organism, but has no “history” because it doesn’t act like a human |
| Second quote | A three-stage classification — isolating (W), agglutinating (W+s), inflecting (W’) — each with its own notation |
| Shared impulse | Building linguistics as a natural-scientific system, modeled on botanical classification |
In a nutshell — a single footnote sentence, and a formula-like system of symbols: together, these two passages compress Schleicher’s ambition to turn linguistics into a natural science.