Schleicher's tale is an experiment in writing in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical ancestor of all modern Indo-European languages. Nobody knows what it was really like, of course, so it's all close to guesswork.

The language of the “story” has evolved since August Schleicher published the original in 1868. In a previous version of this page, I presented a couple of examples. Since then, a much better page has appeared in Wikipedia, so there's no point maintaining this page any more.