Through comparison of Swadesh-200 word list cognates and the employment of lexicostatistics, accompanied by detailed cognate sound changes, the branching of some Uralic languages have been statistically determined. While acknowledging that not all aspects of language history are tree-like, and that integrated models which capture both vertical and lateral language relations may depict language history more realistically, we claim that all models which claim that vertical language relations can be completely ignored are essentially wrong: Either they silently still use family trees, or they only provide a static display of data and thus fail to model temporal aspects of language history. At the same time, methodological limits in historical reconstruction may easily lead to an overestimation of regularity, which may in turn surface as conflicting patterns when trying to reconstruct a coherent phylogeny. In comparing the phenomenon of incomplete lineage sorting in biology with processes in linguistics, we show that data which does not seem to be resolvable in trees may well be explained without turning to diffusion as an explanation. In order to save the trees from the critics, we show that the concrete arguments brought up in favor of anachronistic wave models do not hold. While the logical necessity of the tree model follows directly from the basic assumptions underlying linguistic reconstruction, the practical necessity of the tree-model follows from its implications for a realistic modeling of language history, which always needs to involve a before and after of events. In this paper, we show that family trees are not only a logical but also a practical necessity in linguistic reconstruction. This scepticism has further increased with recently proposed techniques for data visualization which seem to confirm that we can study language history without trees. Although scholars have emphasized that the tree model and its longstanding counterpart, the wave theory, are not necessarily incompatible, the opinion that family trees are unrealistic and should be completely abandoned from historical linguistics has always enjoyed a certain popularity. Scepticism against the tree model has a long tradition in historical linguistics.
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