Trees and Waves
Historical Linguistics and Language Families
Course 1 · Chapter 6 · Trees and Waves
Chapter 5 drew Indo-European as a tree. A tree is a good picture of one thing: a language splits into daughters and they drift apart. But languages also meet. Words are borrowed, features spread between neighbours, and unrelated languages can end up looking alike. This chapter looks at what the tree leaves out.
The Tree and Its Problem
Wikipedia's article on the wave model says the tree model "struggles to explain some shared features, especially in the Germanic languages". A tree can show that two branches share a recent ancestor; it cannot easily show that a change spread across the boundary between branches after they had separated.
| Model | Picture | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Tree | a line that forks and never rejoins | descent, subgroups (Chapters 3 to 5) |
| Wave | an innovation spreading outward, with waves overlapping in intersecting patterns | dialect continua, areal phenomena, features shared across branches |
How the wave model works
- An innovation starts in one area and spreads speaker to speaker and dialect to dialect. Innovations can overlap in intersecting patterns, which the tree cannot easily represent.
- Dialectology uses linguistic atlases and maps to show isoglosses (the boundaries of a feature) and dialect boundaries, including fuzzy ones such as the Croissant and the Rhenish fan (the page's own examples).
- Schmidt's continuum metaphor: a smooth slope becomes a stepped line, with each step a dialect. Some steps fade, while others, like Standard German, can spread and replace local dialects.
- Advocacy for the model is credited to Johannes Schmidt and Hugo Schuchardt.
Language Contact
Wikipedia's article on language contact lists what can happen when speakers of different languages meet:
| Outcome | What it is | Example from the source |
|---|---|---|
| Borrowing | "The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words"; influence can reach morphology and grammar | Newar absorbed noun inflection and verb tenses from neighbouring Indo-Iranian languages |
| Code-switching | multilingual speakers use multiple languages in a single conversation | (none given) |
| Pidgin, creole | a pidgin forms among people without a common language and may become a creole; some linguists deny a creole must pass through a pidgin stage | Ndyuka (Aukan) and Saramaccan, in Suriname, draw their vocabulary mainly from Portuguese, English and Dutch |
| Mixed language | forms among communities fluent in both source languages; keeps much of the parents' grammatical and phonological complexity | (none given) |
| Language shift and death | one language replaces another, most often the one with higher prestige; can lead to endangerment or extinction | (none given) |
Loanword cases
- Latin and French into English: the page describes the large-scale import of words from these languages in the 16th and 17th centuries as more significant than modern English borrowing into other languages.
- Iranian into Armenian: Armenian borrowed so many Iranian words that it was at first considered a divergent Indo-Iranian branch. This is a warning for Chapter 3: heavy borrowing can fake relationship, so correspondence sets must come from basic vocabulary. Armenian is, in the Indo-European table of Chapter 5, a branch of its own.
- English into Hindi and Scots, Afrikaans into South African English, and Chinese into Japanese, where some Japanese coinages based on Chinese forms were later reborrowed into Chinese.
During much of the Middle Ages, upper-class English speech was "dramatically influenced" by Norman, the page says, to the point that it often resembled a dialect. It also gives English phrases adapted from French where the adjective follows the noun: court-martial, attorney-general, Lake Superior.
Linguistic Areas (Sprachbunds)
A sprachbund (linguistic area) is a group of languages that share "areal features" from geographic proximity and language contact. The languages may be genetically unrelated or only distantly related. A sprachbund is defined by features shared for reasons other than common descent. Without the history of a region, it can be hard to tell whether shared features indicate a family or a sprachbund. The page says these shared features "might give a false appearance of relatedness."
| Area | Languages | Shared features |
|---|---|---|
| Balkans | Albanian, Romanian, southern South Slavic languages, Greek, Balkan Turkish, Romani (Turkish is Turkic; the rest are Indo-European) | avoiding the infinitive; forming the future tense in similar ways |
| South Asia | Dravidian and Indo-Aryan, with Munda and Sino-Tibetan also cited (Emeneau, 1956) | retroflex consonants, echo words, SOV word order, discourse markers, the quotative |
| Mainland Southeast Asia | Sinitic, Hmong-Mien, Tai, Vietnamese, with Khmer, Cham, Lao | tone systems, similar vowel systems, isolating structure, classifiers, OV order, topic-comment structure; the modern consensus places these languages in unrelated families |
| Standard Average European | modern Indo-European languages of Europe (Whorf, 1939); Romance and West Germanic at the core, North Germanic and Balto-Slavic more peripheral | (the page says Proto-Indo-European lacked most of these features, so inheritance is ruled out) |
The page also lists Mesoamerica as a linguistic area of the Americas, but gives no specific features. It attributes these similarities to diffusion during sustained contact and to convergence caused by language contact.
Try It Yourself
In one sentence each, say what the tree model explains and what it does not, and what the wave model adds. Use the Germanic problem from the source.
📄 View solutionGreek, Romanian and Albanian avoid the infinitive, but so does Balkan Turkish, which is not Indo-European. Explain why the shared feature does not prove they are related, using the Balkans entry.
📄 View solutionClassify each as borrowing, pidgin or creole, mixed language, or language shift: Armenian taking Iranian words; Ndyuka and Saramaccan; Newar taking verb tenses from neighbours; English phrases such as attorney-general.
📄 View solutionChapter 6 Quick Reference
- Tree = descent by splitting; wave = spread of an innovation; use both
- Isoglosses map the boundary of a feature; linkages need the wave model
- Contact outcomes: borrowing, code-switching, pidgin and creole, mixed language, shift and death
- Heavy borrowing can fake relatedness (Armenian and Iranian); only basic correspondence sets prove kinship
- A sprachbund shares features through contact, not descent (Balkans, South Asia, Southeast Asia)