Beyond a time depth of about a thousand years, history and typology often do not correlate well at all. Languages can change from grammatical type to type relatively quickly, and can cycle among a few types over and over; aside from vocabulary, they do not progressively differentiate and diverge. For example, English has changed from a free-word-order, highly inflected, topic-prominent language, as its sister German remains to this day, to a fixed-word-order, poorly inflected, subject-prominent
