On the Romance Languages Mutual Intelligibility

Abstract

We propose a method for computing the similarity of natural languages and for clustering them based on their lexical similarity. Our study provides evidence to be used in the investigation of the written intelligibility, i.e., the ability of people writing in different languages to understand one another without prior knowledge of foreign languages. We account for etymons and cognates, we quantify lexical similarity and we extend our analysis from words to languages. Based on the introduced methodology, we compute a matrix of Romance languages intelligibility.

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