An Alternative to Tree Structures

One thing we brought up in historical linguistics was something of an alternative to tree diagrams. Trees are really nice for representing linear branchings and genetic relatedness, but have a hard time describing what exactly is similar between two languages; as such, some people in linguistics have proposed what’s called the “wave model” of linguistics. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia Article.

For those of you who don’t want to read it, I’ll summarize it here. Basically, you put down the names of the languages on paper and then draw lines around certain subsets of them. Each enclosed area represents a single innovation that sets those languages apart from the rest that you’re studying. The primary advantage to it is that it’s based in featural commonalities, so it’s really easy to see what exactly particular languages share. Disadvantages include the fact that they’re painstakingly difficult to draw and to read, and sometimes the person making them screws up and you get lines bleeding into each other… they can be a real mess.

That said, since they allow you to look at certain changes, if you took things like, say, Early Latin, Classical Latin, Late Latin, a couple dialects of Old French, a couple of Middle French, and a couple of Modern French, those lines are going to tell you what sort of changes happened when and how, simply by mapping the linguistic changes onto the fairly well-known historical record of the area and cultures.

Also, wave models can make it very easy to distinguish which features are “genetically” conditioned (that is, those that the language retained from it’s ancestor language) and those that are “areally” conditioned (those that the language assimilated from other nearby languages). All you really have to do is look at the features shared between most of the languages in its area and those that shared between most everything else in its family.

Of course, life’s rarely that simple, since languages move with the cultures that speak them and so often times it’s no easy task to determine why the language has the areal features it does. But I think the idea’s kind of a cool one.

Also, and this is just a side note, we should have a tag for culture.