1. All right, so far we have been looking at some of the core areas of linguistics, like syntax, phonology, semantics, and these are things that we can study by looking at one language at a time, how sounds, and words, and sentences work in a given language, but the branch of historical linguistics, involves the comparison of several different languages, or the comparison of different stages of a single language.
2. Now, one way of representing the evolution of languages, showing the way languages are related to each other, is with the family tree model, like a family tree that you might use to trace back through generations of ancestors, only it's showing a family of genetic all related languages instead of people, a tree model for a language family starts with one language, which we call a mother language.
3. The mother language, is the line on the top of this diagram, over time, it branches off into new daughter languages, which branch into daughter languages of their own, and languages that have the same source, the same mother, are called sisters, they share a lot of characteristics, and this went on until we are looking at a big upside down tree languages like this. It is incomplete of course, just to give you an idea, so that's the family tree model, basically.
4. Well, most people think that lions only come from Africa, and you would be forgiven for thinking this, because in fact most lions do come from Africa, but this hasn't always been the case. If we go back ten thousand years we would find that there were lions roaming vast sections of the globe, but now, unfortunately, only very small sections of the lions' former habitat remain, my particular interest is Asiatic lions, which are a sub-species of African lions.
5. However, Europe saw its last Asiatic lion roaming free two thousand years ago. Over the next nineteen hundred years the numbers of Asiatic lions in the other areas declined steadily, but it was only in the nineteenth century that they disappeared from everywhere but India, so, how can you tell an Asiatic lion from an African lion, with which you're probably more familiar? Well, in general,Asiatic lions are not as big as African lions.
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