How does this visual representation give us a different sense of meaning than a traditional map?
“This linguistic map paints an alternative map of Europe, displaying the language families that populate the continent, and the lexical distance between the languages. The closer that distance, the more words they have in common. The further the distance, the harder the mutual comprehension.
“The map shows the language families that cover the continent: large, familiar ones like Germanic, Italic-Romance and Slavic; smaller ones like Celtic, Baltic and Uralic; outliers like Semitic and Turkic; and isolates – orphan languages, without a family: Albanian and Greek.”
http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages
Here is a site with some additional posts and discussions of related issues by the creator of this image.
https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/category/linguistics/
TOK Topics 