Soru

Passage A
The foundational methodology of comparative linguistics relies almost exclusively on the family tree model. By comparing related words across distinct languages, historical linguists can systematically reconstruct the phonology, grammar, and vocabulary of an unrecorded ancestral proto-language. This comparative method inherently assumes that linguistic divergence occurs through discrete splits: a speech community separates—usually due to geographic migration—and the two newly isolated groups develop their languages independently. While historical linguists readily acknowledge that languages occasionally borrow vocabulary from their neighbors through contact, they maintain that the core of a language—its morphological structure and fundamental lexicon—is inherited strictly vertically through the lineage of the tree. To treat every shared linguistic trait as a potential horizontal borrowing would render the reconstruction of ancestral languages virtually impossible, as the entire comparative enterprise requires distinguishing between shared genetic inheritance and later contact. Therefore, operating under the assumption of branching, isolated divergence as the primary engine of linguistic evolution is not just theoretically elegant; it is a strict methodological necessity for uncovering the prehistoric roots of human speech.

Passage B
Despite its continued ubiquity in introductory textbooks, the cladistic or "family tree" model of language change presents an overly neat and ultimately distorted picture of linguistic history. Recognizing the artificiality of positing abrupt splits between languages, early critics of the tree model proposed an alternative framework: the wave model. In this view, linguistic innovations—whether a shifted vowel sound or a novel grammatical construction—do not wait for populations to physically migrate or completely separate. Instead, they spread outward from a center of innovation like ripples in a pond, moving fluidly across contiguous speech communities. Because different innovations originate in different centers and spread at different rates, they create a complex web of overlapping linguistic boundaries rather than neat, discrete language families. The strict tree model demands clear-cut linguistic borders, yet historical reality consistently presents us with dialect continuums where neighboring speakers can understand one another perfectly well, even if the extreme ends of the continuum are mutually incomprehensible. Acknowledging the wave model means accepting that linguistic history is fundamentally a messy story of ongoing social contact, not merely a chronicle of genetic isolation and divergence.

Based on the passages, how would the author of Passage A most likely characterize the "wave model" discussed in Passage B?