This feature began with an overview and has traced the claim that “language lives but has no history,” the framework of development followed by decay, a three-stage classification with its own notation, and connections to Bopp, Darwin, and Jespersen. To close, let’s grade this nearly-190-year-old textbook from the vantage point of linguistics today.
What has genuinely held up
The asterisk (*) notation for reconstructed forms, as the close-reading article showed, remains in everyday, standard use in comparative linguistics today. The mark Schleicher himself omitted from Proto-Indo-European forms was refined by later generations into something applied consistently to every reconstructed form — and it has survived to this day.
The three-stage typology of isolating, agglutinating, and inflecting languages has also had its details substantially revised, but the vocabulary is still referenced in textbooks as a rough way of talking about the morphological character of languages. And the method of systematically comparing entire grammatical systems across languages, inherited from Bopp and passed through Schleicher, flows directly into comparative linguistics today.
What was overturned
On the other hand, the claim read in another article — that “language lives, but because it doesn’t act like a human, it has no history” — has been almost entirely rejected by modern linguistics. Language change is the product of a thoroughly human “history”: social interaction among speakers, power relations, contact, and the accumulation of choices. This is the shared understanding of linguistics today, and the “life of language” that Schleicher tried to separate from “human history” turns out to be, in fact, inseparably bound up with it.
And the “development followed by decay” view of history, seen in the article connecting him to Jespersen, was clearly rejected by twentieth-century linguistics. Modern linguistics does not view the loss of complex inflection as “decay.” The widely shared position today is that whatever function inflection once carried simply shifts form — into word order, function words, and other mechanisms — with no hierarchy of superiority involved.
The last thread tying seven features together
This history-series set has now traced seven figures: Jones’s single paragraph, Rask’s prize essay, Grimm’s table of correspondences, Bopp’s comparison of whole grammatical systems, Müller’s lectures, Jespersen’s synthesis, and now Schleicher.
Of the seven, Schleicher’s story shows with unusual clarity that a brilliant methodological tool (the asterisk, systematic comparison) and a worldview born from a dangerous metaphor (language has no history, decay as destiny) can coexist inside the very same scholar. The former survived, unselected against, down to today; the latter was scrutinized and revised, hard, by the next generation and the one after that. What survives from a scholar’s body of work, and what doesn’t, is decided by nothing other than the relentless scrutiny of the generations that follow — and that is the final lesson running through all seven features in this series.
Summary
| Verdict | Subject |
|---|---|
| Genuinely held up | The asterisk notation for reconstructed forms / three-stage language typology vocabulary / comparing whole grammatical systems |
| Overturned | “Language lives but has no history” / “development is followed only by decay” |
| A limit to keep in mind | The very idea of treating language change as a “natural process cut off from humans” was later put to dangerous use |
In a nutshell — the tools Schleicher sharpened (the asterisk, systematic comparison) are still in use today. But the framework he imposed on language — a natural object with no history of its own — was reclaimed for human hands by the linguistics of the twentieth century.