Wright's and Wald's comments on Dixon's "The rise and fall of languages"

[manaster at umich.edu]

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I think Robert R. overstates things a tad.  I dont think
that family trees are as useless in dialectology as he
makes out.  The fact of chains of mutually intelligible
dialects does not mean that there are not neat splits.
There is no contradiction here at all.  Dutch-German is
a continuum but I dont anyone would question that there
is a major split within between Low German and High German,
even though neighboring LG and HG communities communicate
very easily.  I dont know enough about Arabic dialects
off the top of my head to be able to say much to this
example, but in several languages or language families
where people once despaired of family trees new
research shows just wrong they were.  Uto-Aztecan
is a clear example, where i believe that my
demosntration of the reality of the Northern-Uto-Aztecan
node has been fairly widely accepted and has not been
as far as I know contested publicly at all.
 
AMR