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Cladistic representation of the Mayan linguistic family, going back 4000 years.(The numbers represent proposed historical dates in the Common Era).. In historical linguistics, the tree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree, particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species.
The tree model presumes that all the circles should be nested and never crosscut, but studies in dialectology and historical linguistics show that assumption to be usually wrong and suggest that the wave-based approach may be more realistic than the tree model. A genealogical family in which isoglosses intersect is called a dialect continuum or ...
Historical glottometry is a method used in historical linguistics. It is a quantitative, non-cladistic approach to language subgrouping. The aim of historical glottometry (HG) is to address the limitations of the tree model when applied to dialect continua and linkages. It acknowledges that the genealogical structure of a linkage typically ...
A rooted tree explicitly identifies a common ancestor, often by specifying a direction of evolution or by including an "outgroup" that is known to be only distantly related to the set of languages being classified. Most trees are binary, that is a parent has two children. A tree can always be produced even though it is not always appropriate.
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy.
In historical linguistics, a daughter language, also known as descendant language, is a language descended from another language, its mother language, through a process of genetic descent. [1] If more than one language has developed from the same proto-language , or 'mother language', those languages are said to be sister languages , members of ...
The wave model was developed in 1872 by Schleicher's student Johannes Schmidt as an alternative to the tree model that incorporates geographic diffusion. [ 12 ] The tree model also has the same limitations as biological taxonomy with respect to the species problem of quantizing a continuous phenomenon that includes exceptions like ring species ...
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. [1] It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages.