alignment

Alignment

Alignment axiom

Two words shall be called aligned or alignable when their progressive Levenshtein distance is low, that is, when they have high phonetic similarity compatible with universal sound-change correspondences.

As such alignment is per se orthogonal to relatedness. However aligned words have a high (but not perfect) chance of being related in the classical or extended senses, or through various forms of connectedness.

Alignment is a soft form of Phono-semantic-matching of loan words. The imported word keeps some of the sounds but the structure is severely altered to match something within the target language.

Alignment within the same language is called reanalysis.

Alignment within the same language family is excessively frequent.

cucaracha cockroach Kakerlake

ἅρπαξ hárpax habgierig

In polylingual societies after the big genetical mixing event of the Neolithic, such formations were probably quite frequent, especially in trade terms, additional to wanderworts.

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