Lexical similarity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Lexical similarity
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100% ) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. There are different ways to define the lexical similarity and the results vary accordingly. For example, Ethnologue's method of calculation consists in comparing a standardized set of wordlists and counting those forms that show similarity in both form and meaning. Using such a method, English was evaluated to have a lexical similarity of 60% with German and 27% with French. Lexical similarity can be used to evaluate the degree of genetic relationship between two languages. Percentages higher than 85% usually indicate that the two languages being compared are likely to be related dialects.[1] The lexical similarity is only one indication of the mutual intelligibility of the two languages, since the latter also depends on the degree of phonetical, morphological, and syntactical similarity. It is worth noting that the variations due to differing wordlists weigh on this. For example, lexical similarity between French and English is considerable in lexical fields relating to culture, whereas their similarity is smaller as far as basic (function) words are concerned. Unlike mutual intelligibility, lexical similarity can only be symmetrical.

Contents
1 Indo-European languages 2 References 3 Notes 4 See also

Indo-European languages
The table below shows some lexical similarity values for pairs of selected Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, as collected and published by Ethnologue.[2]
Lang. code

Language 1 1 0.27 0.60 0.24 eng 0.27 1 0.29 0.89 0.75 0.75 0.78 0.80 0.75 fra 0.60 0.29 1 deu 0.89 1 0.77 0.78 0.85 0.82 ita

Lexical similarity coefficients English French German Italian Portuguese Romanian Romansh Russian Sardinian Spanish

eng English fra French deu German ita Italian por Portuguese ron Romanian roh Romansh rus Russian srd Sardinian spa Spanish Language 2 Notes:

0.75 1 0.72 0.74 0.89 por

0.75 0.77 0.72 1 0.72 0.83 0.71 ron

0.78 0.78 0.74 0.72 1 0.74 0.74 roh

0.24 1 rus

0.80 0.85 0.83 0.74 1 0.76 srd

0.75 0.82 0.89 0.71 0.74 0.76 1 spa

English French German Italian Portuguese Romanian Romansh Russian Sardinian Spanish

Language codes are from standard ISO 639-3. Ethnologue does not specify for which Sardinian variety the lexical similarity was calculated. "-" denotes that comparison data are not available.

References
Ethnologue.com (http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp) (lexical similarity values available at some of the individual language entries)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

25/08/2013 20:38:53

Lexical similarity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Definition of lexical similarity at Ethnologue.com (http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/introduction.asp) Rensch, Calvin R. 1992. "Calculating lexical similarity." In Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Windows on bilingualism , 13-15. (Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, 110). Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.

Notes
1. ^ http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/introduction.asp 2. ^ See, for instance, lexical similarity data for French (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=fra), German (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_ language.asp?code=deu), English (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng)

See also
Lexis (linguistics) Vocabulary Language family Dialect Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lexical_similarity&oldid=565898909" Categories: Language comparison This page was last modified on 26 July 2013 at 15:18. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

25/08/2013 20:38:53