(born Feb. 19, 1821, Meiningen, Saxe-Meiningen—died Dec. 6, 1868, Jena, Prussia) German linguist. He began his career studying classical and Slavic languages.
Influenced by G.W.F. Hegel and Charles Darwin, he formed the theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity, and decline. He invented a system of language classification that resembled a botanical taxonomy, tracing groups of related languages and arranging them in a genealogical tree. His model, the Stammbaumtheorie (“family-tree theory”), was a major development in the study of Indo-European languages. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages (1874–77), in which he attempted to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European.
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