Abstract
This paper introduces CogNet, a new,
large-scale lexical database that provides
cognates—words of common origin and
meaning—across languages. The database
currently contains 3.1 million cognate pairs
across 338 languages using 35 writing systems. The paper also describes the automated
method by which cognates were computed
from publicly available wordnets, with an
accuracy evaluated to 94%. Finally, statistics
and early insights about the cognate data
are presented, hinting at a possible future
exploitation of the resource1 by various fields
of lingustics