alt Hacker NewsThe tree appearance just makes it too inviting to imagine PIE as some pristine ur-language, the kind of original language of Babel. I'm not saying that people explicitly think these thoughts, just that it's easy to get this impression, even if it's not conscious. The fascination about the original human tongue in Eden used to be a common intellectual preoccupation. My point here is that PIE is quite a different story.
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xhevahir • today at 7:21 PM
The tree is used to show species, too, but I can't see anyone looking at one and imagining that some weird reptile-looking thing is the pure essence of mammal. Some people are prone to getting bad ideas about ancestry (the Nazis' search for an Aryan homeland is an example) but you can hardly blame illustrations like this.
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Is it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained, because anyone with that mentality isn't going to be paying attention anyway.
[Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]