As the previous article showed, Schleicher treated language as a natural organism, like an oak tree. That same idea carries straight through into how he framed the whole arc of language “history.”
Splitting a language’s life into two stages
Schleicher divided the life of every language into two broad periods.
The first is the period of “development” — the stage in which language grows from an unrefined state of sound and form into an elaborate grammatical system. The intricate conjugations and case systems of an inflecting language (one like Latin or Sanskrit, where word endings shift in fine detail) appear, on his account, as the peak of this development.
The second is the period of “decay” — the stage in which a grammatical system, having once reached its peak, gradually erodes in sound and form. In Schleicher’s view, every language we know from historical records — the “historical period” — belongs entirely to this stage of decay.
Which means: the languages we speak today have already “decayed”
This is the boldest part of Schleicher’s claim. Modern Greek is, grammatically, simpler than ancient Greek. French and Italian have lost much of the inflectional complexity that Latin had. Schleicher called this kind of change not “progress” but “decay” (Verfall). By his account, the entire historical period — everything we have written records of — is already on the far side of language’s peak, on the way down.
A framework that would fuel a later dispute
This “decay, not progress” framework was more than a passing theory. As later articles in this feature show, more than half a century later, Otto Jespersen would argue the exact opposite — reading the very same process of losing complex inflection not as “decay” but as “progress by way of simplification.” Facing the identical phenomenon — inflection wearing away — one calls it decay, the other calls it progress. The next article, reading Schleicher’s own words in the original German, makes the roots of that clash easier to see.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| First stage | Prehistory — grammar “develops” from simple toward an elaborate system |
| Second stage | History — the elaborate system “decays” in sound and form |
| Consequence | Every recorded language history is, for Schleicher, nothing but a slope downward |
| Later dispute | More than half a century on, Jespersen reframes the same phenomenon as progress |
In a nutshell — for Schleicher, the historical period was a long decline that began only after language had already passed its peak.