I find it somewhat surprising that these studies focus so much on vocabulary. Syntax seems to be much more stable over time. All languages have so many "loan w

I find it somewhat surprising that these studies focus so much on vocabulary. Syntax seems to be much more stable over time. All languages have so many "loan words" (do they ever give them back?) and borrowing words happens so quickly that I find it impossible to model this over millennia. Surely, we're dealing with a more general graph here, not with a simple tree.