Genealogia e metafore linguistiche tra discretezza e continuità. Ricezione e reinterpretazione della Wellentheorie

In 19th-century linguistics, the relationships between languages are expressed through various metaphorical images (tree, waves, plane, ladder, circle and chain, fan or cone). These images correspond to increasingly complex representations of the life and transformation of languages, where the discrete model of the tree gradually yields to continuist models, in which the spatial dimension is added to the dimension of time. In at least one case, the representation of these very relationships is conveyed by a three-dimensional image.