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I just saw a post asking about a cladogram, and referencing a specific linguistic clade. I don't understand how linguistic taxonomy works at all, but I know what a clade is in biology: It must include a common ancestor and every one of its descendants, and it must not include any group that does not share that ancestor.
As far as I understand, it would be nearly impossible for a linguistic clade to exist, wouldn't it? There's so much horizontal transfer between languages, and I assume two languages probably merge into one at times. To be fair, horizontal gene transfer does happen in biology, but you can almost always ignore it for taxonomic purposes. Whereas with language, it's extremely common.
Am I misunderstanding something?
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For the purposes of linguistic taxonomy, horizontal transfer is irrelevant - languages are grouped based on ancestry, ignoring the influence of other languages.
English has borrowed massively from French, but it's still part of the Germanic subfamily, because there's an unbroken line of native speaker transmission from Proto-Germanic to contemporary English.
Okay that does make sense. But aren't there languages that are a mix of two? (I think that's called a creole? Or a pidgin maybe?)
They are either seen as starting their own tree. That's not uncommon we have several languages that we cannot put anywhere. We can also not merge all language families into a single tree.
Or they are seen as child languages of the parent that provided the majority of the lexicon. The lexifer. Those usually exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexifier?wprov=sfla1
There is a lot of debate about the status of creoles and how to classify them, the approach i am most familiar with tries to go to the grammar and function words of the creole and classifies them based on the syntax and morphology, so it still retains the core of the one language or another.
I think that the biological analogy mostly breaks down for creoles. At least until we create custom life forms in the lab. ConLife or ConBio if you will. Then, even if you combine elements of just two natural organisms, the new one will not really belong to any natural clade.
Yeah I guess I'm taking it too literally.
Though tbh it breaks down in biology too when you zoom in too far, because fertile hybrids do exist, and 'species' is defined very vaguely. And when you go back far enough, you get a tangled mess.
Yeah, the simple tree of life I was taught as a kid has an awful lot of interconnections.
Wouldn't that be more analogous to the conlangs that have native speakers?
Are there any such conlangs?
A linguistic cladogram is properly called a tree model, which shows the relationships between daughter languages and a parent. It usually gives a broad overview of linguistic splits. Such as this one which shows that the Ingvæones diverged from Proto-Germanic with the others, then Frisian diverged from North Sea Germanic while Anglic and Saxon (along with traces of Fris and Jute) merged into Old English, and so on.
This horizontal merger, usually termed a koiné or 'common', does occasionally happen between very closely related languages (see: Dano-Norwegian), but at the same time you wouldn't call French and Spanish the same languages despite them both descending from Latin.
Similar charts are used to group languages by similarity and relationship, basically how similar they are to each other. Such as this one for the Romance languages.
Okay that makes sense, I appreciate the thoroughness. It still sounds like "clade" isn't an accurate word though
The word 'clade' is from the Ancient Greek κλάδος and means "shoot or branch", and is used to describe the way in which things branch off from other things. Be it species or languages.
What you're calling "horizontal transfer" is what we'd call "borrowing". Anything can be borrowed (sounds, word, morphemes, syntactic structures, idioms, etc.) but this doesn't fundamentally disrupt the language or change its ancestry. Indeed, there is extensive research into how people modify and adapt borrowed elements to make them fit better into their native language. English has borrowed extensively from French, but English is unquestionably a Germanic language, not a Romance one.
The situation gets much more complicated with creoles. These are 'fusions' which emerge when speakers of multiple different languages are forced together (a typical situation would be a worker camp or plantation). Adults learn bits and bobs of each other's languages, creating a not-quite-fully-formed system called a pidgin. When children are exposed to the pidgin as their primary input, they 'fill in the gaps', creating a fully grammatical creole language. Classification of creoles is controversial, and generally the top-level node in their family tree is something abstract like "English Creole" or "French Creole" depending on the strata.
Have any creoles become major languages? I figure that's when it would become most difficult to place them on a tree
No major world languages, but there are some important regional ones. Tok Pisin, Jamaican Patois, and Haitian Creole each have millions of speakers. Papiamentu is an official language in Curaçao and Aruba.
Why would you think "major" status would make it harder to place on the tree? A major language has more data and more resources, so it should actually be easier.
I was thinking that if you had a creole that became a major language with a bunch of branches, it would be hard to design its physical position on a tree lol
Sorry this is a slight tangent, I'm just seeing if I understand you here: would esperanto be considered a creole?
No, Esperanto is classified as a "constructed language" because it was intentionally created by someone. Creoles emerge naturally, through the process of child language acquisition.
It’s not the mainstream opinion, but some linguists consider modern English the descendant of a creole or semi-creole.
Although there was a lot of contact and transfer, I don’t know of any credible source that suggests that it’s a creole. If you have any to offer, I’d be interested to read more
I think this is an extremely minority opinion today.
Eh, that’s kind of a crank opinion. Sally Thomason, one of the preeminent theorists of language contact phenomena, puts no stock in it at all: there’s no significant Romance influence on English syntax, and a loss of inflection and a settling of word order really isn’t as radical a change as proponents of this theory want it to be. Romance languages likewise lose a ton of inflection and settle their word order, but that isn’t regarded as a symptom of creolization.
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This is not what "creole" means and the hypothesis that English is a creole is not taken seriously.
This comment was removed for containing inaccurate information.
Languages can and do form clades. Sometimes geographic barriers create more or less clean splits between two languages. But you're absolutely correct that linguistic speciation tends to be messier than that. There are some language families/branches for which the tree model is particularly ineffective (those that remain in prolonged direct contact even as they start and continue to diverge), and for these the wave model has been proposed as an alternative.
It's about what the language comes from. English may have a lot of words from Greek (from Proto-Hellenic), Latin (from Proto-Italic), French (from Vulgar Latin) and Old Norse (from Proto-North Germanic); but it still comes from Proto-West Germanic
Like biological clades, linguistic clades abstract away from horizontal transfer and consequently are somewhat misleading when that transfer is especially extensive, but that's rarer than it seems. English is still decidedly Germanic in its grammar in spite of a huge influx of Romance vocabulary; likewise Japanese isn't related to Chinese, but has a great deal of Chinese borrowings. For Japanese/Chinese you can see this especially clearly since the grammar is about as dissimilar as pairs of languages get, in spite of large vocabulary overlap. You might think of languages like this, with heavy borrowing from a different family, as analogous to something like transgenic organisms, corn with jellyfish genes or what have you, except that it can occur naturally, as it does in bacteria etc. In a true mixed language, in contrast, there isn't an easy demarcation between borrowings and the substrate into which they're borrowed.
Michif is a commonly cited example of a mixed language, having substantial parts of its grammar derived from both French and Cree. This is in clear contrast to French or Latin borrowings in English, which haven't kept any of their grammar -- we don't say "before chopping the onion, you must remove his skin" or "soccer matches can only be accommodated in a few of our biggest stadiorum" or "the tumor has spread to both testibus" or anything like that.
They're less cladograms and more family trees. I mean, it is a fact that languages derive from older ones, even if lateral meme transfer is the norm and Dollo's law doesn't apply. The real question is how to represent creoles with a family tree.
Family trees are made of pairs of individuals producing one or more children, I really don't see the structural analogy with language trees.
Linguistic classification is exactly like biological classification in that it’s based on shared innovations. Both ultimately derive their principles from the somewhat older discipline of textual criticism, which was established to help determine the original wording of classical and Biblical texts and which developed that principle in order to classify “families” of manuscripts based on shared errors in their version of the text. As others have said, linguistic borrowing is very common but very rarely changes the structure of the language. It does mean that determining relationships between closely related languages can be very hard! The Slavic languages, for example, often borrow from their neighbors, and since they have similar phonological structures, only close expert scrutiny can determine which words are truly native and which are borrowed.
Using language trees is useful on the whole, but can indeed break down at the detailed level. What do you do you do with a language like Minnan Chinese (Hokkien, Taigi), for example? It has a non-Sino-tibetan substrate which left core words like woman, man, child, pretty, meat, want, even the number "one". It has a major layer of old Chinese vocabulary presumed to reflect the phonology before middle Chinese. But most of these morphemes have been reimported at least once during the Tang-dynasty as an educated layer, not unlike French/Latin-vocabulary in English or onyomi in Japanese. Practically all characters have two readings and some characters can be read with three different pronunciations, reflecting the times that the same element was introduced into the language (cf. wit, view, video). In a tree model, you would describe this as a Sinitic language which split early on from the main Sinitic tree, got grafted onto a non-Sinitic substrate and has one to two Sinitic superstrates branching off from Middle Chinese, but try to get that into a convenient tree diagram ;-).
Side note: I am using morpheme here loosely, because technically it may be lexemes that were reimported ... but the phenomenon shows at the character-level which is closer to what we'd normally call a morpheme. Hope that "broad notation" can be forgiven.
How do we know it's non-Sino-Tibetan?
Wiktionary at least suggests Sino-Tibetan etymologies for most of these, though probably for some it's not the only theory of its etymology.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of hanzi-fetishists in the Minnan community. You can recognize them easily because they'd rather accept the most abstruse connection to a character that has shown up once in an obscure Zhou-text and has an uncertain reading than a non-Sinitic origin of some Minnan words. So, yeah, you will often find "etymologies" which are, however, super-tortured.
cha-bó͘ woman / female - ta-po͘ man / male is completely non-Sinitic in appearance and the often proposed links don't make sense tone-wise or meaning-wise.
bah4 "meat, flesh" has no cognates in other Sinitic variants / cannot be connected phonetically to rou4. A whole range Austronesian or Tai cognates has been proposed - not being a speaker of any of those, I will refrain from judgements on the plausibility, but if it is Sinitic then it's only attested in this one branch which would be indistinguishable from a substrate word.
The same story is true for many other words on my list: beh doesn't link to anything either - "from the grammaticalization of 發" ... still have to read that paper (just downloaded it), but the phonology doesn't make any sense to me. How do you get to a voiced initial? And a -d final becoming an -h is not exactly convincing, either. Looks like another case of Hanzi-fetishism to me. And so forth ...
The problem with this is that, as so often, linguistics and identity get tangled up in one: there are those who want to make even basic Sinitic vocabulary like goá 我 non-Sinitic because they desire to be independent from the yoke of the mainland (one extreme exponent of these kinds of theories went as far as insisting that Taiwanese were Vikings based on shared burial practices and similar humbug). And then there is the other camp that cannot live with the idea that there is any non-Sinitic material in the language because every word has had a Hanzi since 倉頡 handed them down to us ... I have no interest in fighting with either group because they bore me in the extreme - if a word has no plausible connections to any other branch of Chinese, it's a substrate or loan candidate for me, just like we throw "from an unknown Mediterranean language" around when we have a Greek word that does not fit to anything pIE. Can I prove it beyond a reasonable doubt - no. Does it seem congruent with what happened in similar situations elsewhere? Methinks yes.
Ah, I couldn't find an entry for that on Wiktionary.
Wiktionary suggests it might be related to 脢 but also several possible substrate origins.
Could it just be an irregular development? There's a certain amount of those in other branches.