Cladistic language concepts

[Ghiselin, Michael]

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          Dear Dr. Dyen,
               Please accept my thanks for your thoughtful response to
          my query about cladistic language concepts and what might be
          called "chrono-languages."  I have already received some
          good commentary from a couple of other linguists, and these
          preliminary responses are most encouraging.
               Your way of looking at these matters is somewhat
          different from that of my other informants but basically you
          all seem to agree that mere evolution does not cause a
          language to be replaced by another language.  You suggest
          that one might wish to speak of a chronoperson, but unless I
          am mistaken you would not consider such stages as different
          persons in the sense that two siblings are.
               As I see it your solution is to treat languages as
          nexus or concatinations of idiolects, united by actual or
          potential mutual intelligibility, and to get a diachronic
          language concept you pass backward across generations.  It
          is of some interest that in my book I refer to
          intercompatibility of organisms within a species
          as comparable to what we get in computer systems.  Yes, the
          notion of a network is a bit hard to explicate, but what you
          say about them makes a lot of sense to me.
               You mention your commentary on such matters in a
          Festschrift for Hoenigswald.  If it has been published I
          would appreciate a reference.
          Sincerely,
          Michael Ghiselin