‘Family resemblances’

Anyone who knows me and my family can see that I have ‘my father's nose’ (I spare the reader further details). Of course it's really mine, but it looks like his, and my paternal grandfather's as well. This nose (better, more or less faithful copies of it), has been ‘passed down’ in the family. It's a visible sign of my pedigree, carried on my face because its blueprint is carried in my genes, the biological analogue of an armorial bend sinister. It ‘repeats’ from generation to generation; it identifies me as belonging to a particular lineage, is literally a message from the past. In this chapter I explore, starting from rather elementary first principles, the complex notions involved in the idea of linguistic ‘inheritance’, and the sorting of languages into (presumably phylogenetic) taxa.

It's a commonplace that there exist sets of languages that (informally, intuitively) resemble each other in various ways.