This volume contains an introduction and eight papers presented at an international symposium ‘Let's Talk about Trees’, which was organised by Ritsuko Kikusawa and hosted by the National Museum of Ethnology of Osaka, Japan, in February 2013. The stated purpose of the meeting was to evaluate the pros and cons of the classic tree model of historical linguistics in describing the order of splits within a language family. Because the problem of modelling relationships of descent is common to other disciplines, contributors were invited from a range of academic disciplines, including not only linguistics, but also what is described on page one as ‘cladistics’, ‘biology’ and ‘genetics’, although cladistics is clearly a part of biological taxonomy, and not an independent discipline.

中文翻译：

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让我们谈谈树：语言的遗传关系及其系统发育表征

本卷包含在 2013 年 2 月由菊泽律子组织并由日本大阪国立民族学博物馆主办的国际研讨会“让我们谈谈树木”上发表的介绍和八篇论文。会议的既定目的是评估历史语言学经典树模型在描述语系分裂顺序方面的优缺点。由于血统关系建模问题在其他学科中很常见，因此邀请了来自一系列学科的贡献者，不仅包括语言学，还包括第一页上描述的“分支学”、“生物学”和“遗传学”，尽管分类学显然是生物分类学的一部分，而不是一门独立的学科。