tree of language :)
When linguists talk about the historical relationship between
languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say,
Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which
themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed
into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian). Lessons on
language families are often illustrated with a simple tree diagram that
has all the information but lacks imagination. There’s no reason
linguistics has to be so visually uninspiring. Minna Sundberg, creator
of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, a story set in a lushly imagined post-apocalyptic Nordic world, has drawn the antidote to the boring linguistic tree diagram.
Also worth checking out is the page
before the tree, where she gives a comparison chart of words in the
Nordic languages, and illustrates what an outlier Finnish is with the
concept of “meow.”
You can order a poster version here. Read Stand Still. Stay Silent here. Also see Sundberg’s previous work, A Redtail’s Dream
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