K jedné kapitole z dějin jazykovědy. Příspěvek k 150. výročí úmrtí srovnávacího jazykovědce Augusta Schleichera | One chapter in the history of linguistics. A note on the 150th anniversary of the death of comparative linguist August Schleicher

The article concerns the history of linguistics in the 19th century, in particular August Schleicher’s place in the history of linguistics and his scholarly heritage for linguistics in the 20th century, recalling that he was the founder of a method still characteristic of comparative linguistics today. The report describes the theory and methodology of this German representative of comparative linguistics, presenting Schleicher’s research, which was influenced by Darwin’s Origin of Species and by Hegel’s philosophy. In Prague (1850–1857) Schleicher worked intensively on the synchronic and historical grammar of Old Church Slavonic (1852) and of Lithuanian (1856–1857). In Jena (1857–1868) he wrote one of the major syntheses of comparative and historical grammar of the Indo-European languages — his Compendium der vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft der indogermanischen Sprachen (Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, 1861–1862) in which he postulated the first historical and comparative phonology of the Indo-European languages, which depends on the regularity, or “universal validity”, of the rules of sound change, or “sound laws”, and consolidated the large number of phonological and morphological descriptions of individual Indo-European languages into the unified system of a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language; Schleicher then represented the inter-relationships of the Indo-European languages in the form of a genealogical tree diagram (Stammbaum)