Computational historical linguistics
Table 3: Word pair alignments from Spanish and Romanian
['concept', 'alignment', 'PMI score']
The threshold of 4.45 is rather strict; almost all word pairs above this threshold are either cognates or loans. For instance, for the language pair Italian/Albanian, the only translation pair with a higher PMI score is Italian peSe/ Albanian peSk (“fish”), where the former is a descendant and the latter a loan from Latin piscis (cf. http://ielex.mpi.nl). For Spanish/Romanian, two rather divergent Romance languages, we find eight such word pairs.