Svyatchenko V. V.
Key words: naturalism, the language system, phonetic law, language, language family, the theory of “the genealogical tree” of Indo-European languages.
The article examines the work of German linguist A. Shleicher, founder of the naturalistic trends in linguistics. The author noted that Shleicher was the first linguist who tried to reconstruct the Indo-European language as a system of forms, which played an important role in the development of the methodology of reconstruction of a language system. Shleicher noted the contribution in the reconstruction of the phonetic laws.