A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages
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August Schleicher's A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages is a significant work in comparative linguistics. Schleicher, influenced by Hegelian philosophy and pre-Darwinian biology, aimed to establish a scientific theory of language. He studied languages directly from speech, as seen in his Handbook of the Lithuanian Language.
In his Compendium, Schleicher analyzed commonalities among Indo-European languages, attempting to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European parent language. He viewed language as an organism with developmental stages, applying natural science methodologies. This led to his "family-tree theory" (Stammbaumtheorie), a genealogical classification of related languages that greatly influenced Indo-European studies and historical linguistics.1
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