A very short introduction to the linguistic Tree Model
170 years ago historical linguistics and the way we think about languages was changed forever (well, kind of). On August 15 1853, German philologist August Schleicher finished his paper „Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes“ (‚The first splits of the Indo-European people’). It is widely regarded as the beginning of one of the most important models in historical linguistics: the Tree Model. This model assumes that languages develop through separation from older languages. The development can be depicted in the form of a tree. In this blogpost, I will discuss the basic assumptions of the Tree Model. I will also explain why the Tree Model is often attributed to Schleicher, even though he was not the first to come up with it.
If you are already familiar with the Tree Model you may want to have a look at my workshop on different models of language diversification:
What is the Tree Model?
The most basic assumption of the Tree Model is that some languages are related to each other while others are not. You probably know that e.g., English, German and Dutch are related to each other, as are Italian, Spanish and French. Turkish, Mandarin Chinese and Finnish, on the other hand, are not related to these languages.
Related languages use similar words and grammatical features. The crucial criterium for relatedness according to the Tree Model is not similarity but the development from a common ancestor. Italian, Spanish and French all derive from Vulgar Latin, the spoken form of Latin. English, German and Dutch can be traced back to a common Proto-Germanic language. Both Proto-Germanic and Latin eventually developed from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European. They therefore belong to the Indo-European languages.
Turkish, Chinese and Finnish most likely do not share a common ancestor with the Indo-European languages. If they do, our current methods do not allow for us to attest that.
According to the Tree Model, a language diversifies into multiple languages when the original speaker community splits up into several new communities. Schleicher expressed this in the following way:
“From the way how all Indo-European languages are related to each other, one has rightly deduced, that they come from a common source, that one nation, the Indo-European people, over time split into those eight people, of which each in similar manner further differentiated until finally the diversity of our era came into being.”
(Schleicher 1853: 786, my translation)
Imagine a speaker community, i.e., a group of people who speak the same language, living in a village at the foot of a mountain range. One day a part of this community decides to cross the mountains, hoping for a better life . After the crossing, the ‘mountain group’ no longer has any contact to the original speaker community. Going back and forth is too difficult. From now on, the language of the original speaker community in the village and the language of the ‘mountain group’ develop independently. Just like the social group split up, the language split as well.
When more members of the original speaker community leave the village and move to a nearby river, the community and language further splits up. Maybe some members of the ‘mountain group’ decide to travel further towards the sea, another split.
We can depict the splits in our imaginary community in a diagram and voilà: we have a Tree (that is upside down and looks more like a bush, actually):
The language of the original village community is the common ancestor of all new languages, including the language of the descendants of those people who never left the village. The languages of the mountain group and the sea group share an additional common ancestor: the language of the original mountain group. This ancestor language is not shared with the languages of the village community and the river group since their speakers never crossed the mountains.
In the early days of the Tree Model, splits of peoples and languages were equated. We can see this in Schleicher’s first Tree for Indo-European. It does not depict languages like German, Celtic or Greek but peoples like “Deutsche” ‘Germans’, “Celten” ‘Celts’ and “Griechen” ‘Greeks’.
Today, the connection between peoples and languages is considered to be more complex. Migrations of peoples are not necessarily identical to the development of the languages they speak today. For example, the ancestors of many people who today live in France and speak French used to speak Celtic languages. Schleicher’s second Tree for Indo-European already shows languages, not peoples.
Below you see a modern Tree for Indo-European. The common ancestor of all languages in the Tree is usually depicted at the top. The lines (called branches) symbolize the splits. You can trace the lines with your finger and get from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic to West Germanic and then finally to Old English and English.
How do we create linguistic Trees?
How do we know which languages are related and belong into one Tree? In short: by language comparison.
The intuitive answer to this question for you may be: Languages that closely resemble each other are related. And indeed, related languages often show similarities in vocabulary and grammar. But the crucial point is that these similarities must be systematic.
Have a look at the words from the oldest attested Indo-European languages of each branch:
You may notice the following things:
- Almost all words start with a <p>. Except for Gothic, which has <f>, and Armenian and Celtic, which have no consonant at the beginning of the word.
- After that some vowel follows.
- Then follows <t>, <d>, <s> or no consonant.
It is obvious that the words are similar. Language relationship is not determined by accidental similarities though. The similarities must be systematic (regular). For example, Gothic always has an <f> at the beginning of a word where the other languages in the sample have a <p>. Such systematic agreements in sounds are called sound correspondences and they are the most important factor for the Historical Comparative Method. The Historical Comparative Method is the systematic comparison of languages in order to find systematic correspondences in sounds and grammar.
Non-systematic similarities between languages are often due to borrowing. For example, Finnish borrowed the word for ‘king’ kuningas from a Germanic language long ago. The similarity between this word in Finnish and the Germanic languages does not mean that Finnish is a Germanic language.
Sound correspondences result from the shared ancestry of related languages. The new languages continued the words of the ancestor language. When words in different languages developed from the same word in the ancestor language, as in the example with ‘foot’ words above, we call them cognates. English foot and German Fuß are cognate to Ancient Greek poús or Latin pēs. Such words are inherited from the ancestor language while words such as Finnish kuningas are borrowed. The ‘foot’-example also shows that cognates do not have to be obviously similar to each other. Armenian otn does not look like the words in the other languages at all, but thanks to the Historical Comparative Method we know that we have regular sound correspondences in front of us (e.g. Armenian always starts with no consonant where the cognates in the other languages start with a <p>).
Besides sound correspondences, agreements in grammar are also used under the Historical Comparative Method. Have a look at the verbal paradigm (verb forms) in Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Gothic and see if you can find similarities.
For example, the forms of the second person singular (“you”) end with an <-s> in all languages. This is because grammar is also inherited from a common ancestor. The endings are cognate.
I mentioned above that Gothic has <f> where the other Indo-European languages have <p>. This sound change occurred in all Germanic languages. It distinguishes the Germanic languages from the other Indo-European languages.
Shared innovations like this one allow us to further subgroup languages which belong to one language family. Both changes in sounds and grammar are informative about which languages developed together for a while before they split. Shared innovations cannot be traced back to the common ancestor of all related languages but occur in a certain subgroup of languages.
The Historical Comparative Method is the traditional way to create linguistic Trees. But there are more methods. In recent years, Bayesian Phylogenetics has gained popularity. Following this method, large amounts of cognates are processed by a computer that uses Bayesian statistics to detect similarities and create a Tree. Such Trees may be based on a different method but the main assumptions of the Tree Model stay the same.
In summary, linguistic Trees depict changes (innovations) within groups of related languages. All related languages developed from a common ancestor language. But this is only part of the history of a language. I already mentioned that speakers can adopt (borrow) words, and also grammatical features, from other languages when they come into contact with speakers of this language. Contact is not depicted in a Tree. For example, English borrowed a huge amount of vocabulary from French and in this way differs from the other Germanic languages. You won’t find the intense contact between English and French in a Tree because the Tree Model is ‘blind’ for this kind of relationship between languages.
In reality, languages often do not split abruptly from a common ancestor, as the branching in a Tree suggests. Speakers tend to have contact for a while after they moved apart.
Linguistic Trees are only a model of language history, which is based on certain theoretical assumptions. They are not an exhaustive history of all languages depicted in a Tree.
How did the Tree Model develop?
Finally, a brief history of the Tree Model. I said in the introduction that August Schleicher is often seen as the “father” of the Tree Model. Even the street sign of a street named after Schleicher in Sonneberg (Thuringia, Germany) says so.
But Schleicher only summarized in his 1853 article what many scholars already new at this time (he says so himself in the article). The depiction of language history in the form of a tree goes back at least to the 17th century. Look at this beautiful tree by Gallet from ~1880.
The basic assumption of the Tree Model that languages develop from older languages does not go back to Schleicher either. In 1786, Sir William Jones presented his theory on the shared origin of Sanskrit (Old Indian) and several ancient European languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek. Especially one passage is now infamous among linguists:
“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family […].”
(Sir William Jones 1786)
Jones is basically saying the same thing as Schleicher did 70 years later. Schleicher built on the work his predecessors and colleagues had already done. His main contribution in 1853 was the summary of the state of the art at this point in time.
Sources
Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical linguistics : An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.
Jones, Sir William. 1824. Discourses delivered before the Asiatic Society: and miscellaneous papers, on the religion, poetry, literature, etc., of the nations of India. Printed for C. S. Arnold.
List, Johann-Mattis, Jananan Sylvestre Pathmanathan, Philippe Lopez & Eric Bapteste. 2016. Unity and disunity in evolutionary sciences: process-based analogies open common research avenues for biology and linguistics. Biology Direct 11(1). 39. doi:10.1186/s13062-016-0145-2
Trask, Larry. 2015. Trask’s Historical Linguistics. Robert McColl Millar(ed.). London, New York: Routledge.
https://halmahera.hypotheses.org/files/2023/05/Zielenbach-2023-Trees_Waves_and_Friends_Script.pdf
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Maria Zielenbach (29. August 2023). A very short introduction to the linguistic Tree Model. Bäume, Wellen, Inseln - Trees, Waves and Islands. Abgerufen am 24. Januar 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/pf40
