Languages have “family histories” too
“Genetic relationships between languages” series: Part 1
Linguistics tells us that languages naturally evolve and change through time.
Because of this, languages have “histories.”
The languages that exist today (“modern languages”) all evolved throughout their respective histories to arrive at their current forms, and they continue to evolve and change constantly.
Once we understand that all modern languages have histories, we can go on to explore the concept of “historical family relationships”—or “genetic relationships”—between languages.
The different modern languages that exist today belong to different “language families” that go back a long time in history. Each “language family” has a “lineage” that can be traced back to an oldest “ancestor language.” Modern languages that belong to the same “family” all descended from the same ancestor language.
We can think of the lineage of a language family as a “family tree.” A “language family tree,” just like a biological family tree, has “branches” and “offshoots” throughout many “generations” of inheritance, change, and development.
All the modern languages that belong to the same language family are “descendants” of the same “ancestor.” In other words, they are all “genealogically related”—in the same way that the human descendants of a family are all genealogically related.
As one example of “language genealogy,” English belongs to the “Indo-European” family of languages, one of the biggest language families in the world. Most (but not all) of the modern languages spoken in Europe, as well as many modern languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent, belong to this language family and are therefore genealogically related to English.
As another example, Cantonese belongs to the big “Sino-Tibetan” family of languages. All Chinese languages, for example Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, and Hokkien, belong to this language family and are genealogically related to each other—a fact that is obvious to most people more because of the shared culture and history of the people speaking these languages rather than the historical relationship between the languages themselves.
Just like in a biological family, genealogically related languages in the same language family have shared “genetic traits” of grammar, vocabulary, and sounds that they inherited from their common ancestors.
Before we look at how these shared “genetic traits” appear in modern languages that are related, we will first look at how, even within the same language family, different modern languages can be “close relatives” or “distant relatives” of each other depending on how they have developed throughout their family history.
(Note: From a Linguistics perspective, if the speakers of two languages cannot understand each other without having learnt the other language, these two languages are separate “languages” rather than “dialects,” as “dialects” are mostly defined as mutually intelligible varieties of the same language, like Cantonese and Taishanese.
As such, in all our discussions about Chinese in our blog, we treat Chinese languages as different languages, albeit related languages. For our purposes, we would mostly ignore the other social, cultural, historical, and political links that tie these different but related languages together, such as their shared writing system.)
語言也有「家族歷史」
語言之間的「遺傳關係」系列：第1篇
語言學讓我們知道，語言是會隨著時間自然地發展和演變的。
因此，每個語言都擁有自身的「歷史」。
現今存在的各種語言（下稱「現代語言」）都是經歷了自己的發展史才演變成現有的模樣，而且這種發展和演變還會一直持續。
既然知道所有現代語言都有自身的歷史，我們便可以進一步探索各種語言之間的「歷代家族關係」或「遺傳關係」。
當今存在的不同現代語言，都源於不同的「語言家族」。每個「語言家族」都有自己的「血統」，可以追溯至最古老的「祖先語言」。屬於同一個「語言家族」的現代語言都來自同一種最早的祖先語言。
我們可以將語言家族的歷史想成一個「家族樹」（family tree）。 「語言的家族樹」就如我們人類的家族樹一樣，在經歷多個「世代」的遺傳、演變和發展時都會出現「分枝」。
所有屬於同一個語言家族的現代語言，其實都是同一個「祖先」的「後裔」。換言之，它們全都有「親戚關係」 － 如同每個人類家族中的後代都互相有親戚關係一樣。
例如，英文這語言屬於「印歐語系」這個家族，這是世上最大的語言家族之一。多數（但非所有）現存於歐洲的現代語言，以及在印度次大陸中的許多現代語言都屬於這個語言家族，即它們全都跟英文有「親戚關係」。
而廣東話則屬於另一個語言大家族，稱為「漢藏語系」。所有中文語言，例如廣東話、普通話、上海話和福建話等，都同屬這個語系，並都是彼此的「親戚」。（這對我們大多數人來說都是顯然易見的，但這大多是因為操這些語言的人擁有相近的歷史文化背景，而不是因為我們都清楚這些語言本身的歷史關係。）
也如同人類家族一樣，那些在同一語言家族中的有「親戚關係」的語言，都會繼承了共同祖先的文法、詞彙及發音的「遺傳特徵」。
在正式討論這些現代語言中的共享「遺傳特徵」之前，我們先來看看隸屬同一語言家族中，「近親」或「遠親」語言這個概念。
（備註：就語言學角度而言，如果操兩種不同語言的人在沒有學過對方的語言的情況下就無法互相理解，那麼該兩種語言分別都是獨立的「語言」，而並非「方言」。因為「方言」主要被定義為兩種雖有少許不同但彼此能被互相理解的語言，例如廣東話和台山話等。
因此，在博客中所有關於中文的討論，我們會把中文系語言視為不同的語言。為此，縱然有其他社會、文化、歷史和政治等的連結，例如中文共同的書寫系統，聯繫著這些不同但又有「親戚關係」的語言，我們也不會理會。）