Visual formalisms in comparative-historical linguistics

This paper examines visual formalisms in comparative-historical linguistics from the perspective of the history of science. It shows that visual aids representing key understandings of language relationship have followed on pre-existing visual metaphors. Using this observation to pry open canonical metaphors of language relationship, it traces the ways in which these ``visualizations'' have both consolidated existing research programs and opened up new lines of inquiry for students and recent advocates of phylogenetic methods