As the previous chapter showed, Grimm turned regularity into a table, and Bopp brought in the metaphor of an “organism.” But neither had yet claimed that language was, literally, a natural object. In 1861, two scholars cross that line, from two different angles.
“Linguistics is a natural science” — Müller
In the first of a hugely popular lecture series in Britain, Max Müller declares:
There are two great divisions of human knowledge, which, according to their subject-matter, may be called physical and historical. Physical science deals with the works of God, historical science with the works of man. (Article 090)
Language, being something humans speak and reshape, seems like it should obviously belong to “historical science” — the works of man. But Müller deliberately pushes back against that intuition. No individual speaker can simply decide to change the language on a whim. Language changes, beyond the will of any individual speaker, following its own laws — the way a plant or a crystal grows. That’s why linguistics, he argues, belongs with geology and botany, in natural science (Article 090). Müller is also the very person who gave Grimm’s correspondence table the name “Grimm’s Law” and popularized it (Article 091).
“Language lives, but has no history” — Schleicher
In the same year as Müller’s lectures, the German linguist August Schleicher — also a botanist — sets down an even bolder sentence in a footnote to his Compendium:
die sprachen leben, wie alle naturorganismen; sie handeln nicht, wie der mensch, haben also auch keine geschichte…
(Languages live, as all natural organisms do; they do not act, as man does — and therefore… they have no history either. Article 120)
Here, Bopp’s metaphor of an “organism,” from the previous chapter, turns into a literal claim. For Schleicher, language was a natural object, born, growing, and eventually decaying, independent of human will, just like an oak tree. He divided the history of language into two stages — prehistoric “development” and historical “decay” — and argued that every recorded language is already on the far side of its peak, in decline (Article 119).
Another coincidence — a three-stage classification
This conclusion wasn’t the only thing these two arrived at in the same year. Both Müller and Schleicher, independently, adopted a system classifying languages into three stages — isolating, agglutinating, and inflecting (Article 092, Article 120). This classification was presented as a hierarchy of “development,” from simple to complex, lining up exactly with Schleicher’s claim of “prehistoric development.” It was an assumption that, to a greater or lesser degree, most European scholars of the nineteenth century shared.
Summary
| Figure (work, year) | What they claimed | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Müller (1861) | Linguistics is a natural science — subject to the same laws as plants and crystals | Natural law |
| Schleicher (1861) | Language lives, but has no history like a human — decay is a natural process | Natural law |
In a nutshell — in 1861, Bopp’s metaphor grew, in the hands of two scholars, into a literal claim. Language was no longer merely “like an organism” — it had become an organism, full stop. The next chapter looks at how this pendulum begins to swing back, inside a single scholar.