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 (187477), in which he attempted to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European.