Tracking Semantic Change in Cognate Sets for E nglish and R omance Languages (2021)

Abstract: Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. We cross-linguistically investigate the semantic divergence of cognate pairs in English and Romance languages, by means of word embeddings. To this end, we introduce a new curated dataset of cognates in all pairs of those languages. We describe the types of errors that occurred during the automated cognate identification process and manually correct them. Additionally, we label the English cognates according to their etymology, separating them into two groups: old borrowings and recent borrowings. On this curated dataset, we analyse word properties such as frequency and polysemy, and the distribution of similarity scores between cognate sets in different languages. We automatically identify different clusters of English cognates, setting a new direction of research in cognates, borrowings and possibly false friends analysis in related languages.

## introduction and related work semantic change -that is, change in the meaning of individual words @xcite -is a continuous, inevitable process stemming from numerous reasons and influenced by various factors, most of which anchored in the speakers' experiences, encyclopedic knowledge and cognitive mechanisms @xcite . words are continuously changing, with new senses emerging all the time. @xcite presents 11 types of semantic change, that are generally classified in two wide categories: narrowing and widening. in recent years, multiple computational linguistic studies have focused on the issue of semantic change, tracking the shift in the meaning of words by looking at their usage across time in corpora dating from different time periods. more than this, computational linguists have also tried to systematically analyse the principles and statistical laws governing semantic change, such as the law of parallel change and the law of differentiation @xcite , the law of conformity and the law of innovation @xcite , or the law of prototypicality @xcite . more recently, @xcite revisited some of the semantic change laws proposed in previous literature, claiming that a more rigorous consideration of control conditions when modelling these laws leads to the conclusion that they are weaker or less reliable than reported. more extensive surveys of computational studies relating to semantic change have been conducted by @xcite and @xcite . most previous computational studies on lexicalsemantic change have looked at the semantic change of the words within one language, treating each language separately. however, words do not evolve only in their own language in isolation, but are rather inherited and borrowed between and across languages. in most cases, cognates have preserved similar meanings across languages, but there are also exceptions. these are called deceptive cognates or, more commonly, false friends. here we use the definition of cognates that refers to words with similar appearance and some common etymology and use true cognates to refer to cognates which also have a common meaning (e.g. ro. mânȃ, it. mano, fr. main, es. mano, pt. mão 'hand'), and deceptive cognates or false friends to refer to cognate pairs which do not have the same meaning (anymore) (e.g. ro. pleca 'to leave' / fr. plier 'to fold' / es. llegar 'to arrive', all of them originated from lat. plicare 'to fold'). most linguists found psychological and structural factors to be the main cause of semantic change @xcite , but the evolution of technology and socio-cultural changes are not to be omitted. moreover, when a word enters a new language, features specific to that particular language can affect the way it is used and contribute to shaping its meaning through time: existing words in the same language, as well as socio-linguistic, cultural and historical factors (for details concerning the semantic fields most permeable to borrowing, in accordance with the socio-cultural circumstances, cf. @xcite ). the evolution of cognate words in different languages can be seen as a collection of different parallel histories of the proto-word from entering the new languages to its current state. based on this view, we rely on a different framework for studying semantic change: instead of comparing monolingual texts from different time periods as ways to track meanings of words at different stages in time -we compare present meanings of cognate words across different languages, viewing them as snapshots in time of each of the word's different histories of evolution. a comprehensive list of cognates and false friends for every language pair is difficult to find or manually build -this is why applications often rely on automatically identifying them. related to our task, there have been a number of previous studies attempting to automatically extract pairs of true cognates and false friends. most methods are based either on orthographic and phonetic similarity or require large parallel corpora or dictionaries @xcite @xcite . there have been few previous studies using word embeddings for the detection of false friends or cognates, usually using simple methods on only one or two pairs of languages @xcite . @xcite propose a method for identifying and correcting false friends, as well as define a measure of their "falseness", using crosslingual word embeddings and automatically extracted cognate sets @xcite @xcite . expanding upon the direction proposed there, we create a new curated dataset of cognate sets in english and romance languages. additionally, we label the cognate sets according to their etymology and the period they entered the language, separating them into two distinct groups: old borrowings and recent borrowings. on this dataset, we investigate patterns related to the distribution of frequency, polysemy and cross-lingual semantic sim-ilarity across cognates, and show that the similarity distributions of english words show a specific bimodal pattern. we provide qualitative analyses and extensive linguistic interpretations for all our findings. we bring several contributions to the computational study of semantic change and cognate words. to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to approach the problem of dating cognates based on their semantic content. analysing the formal properties of cognates (i.e. their word form) is a method that is well-known in computational historical linguistics to gauge how language families have evolved @xcite . computational approaches to analyse changes in meanings of cognate sets in order to investigate language contact settings have not been considered in historical computational linguistics research. additionally, we publish a novel electronically readable dataset with high quality annotations regarding the period a word entered the english language, for a selection of cognates in english and romance languages. to our knowledge, it is the first of its kind, and we hope it can help further research into computer-assisted analysis of cognate words. ## cognates dataset as our data source, we use the list of cognate sets in romance languages proposed by @xcite . it contains 3,218 complete cognate sets in romanian, french, italian, spanish and portuguese, along with their latin common ancestors, extracted from online etymology dictionaries. the dictionary-based approach for identifying cognates, described in detail in (ciobanu and @xcite , comprises two steps: firstly, the etymological information is extracted from electronic dictionaries; secondly, the etymologies are matched: words with the same language of origin and the same etymon are considered to be cognates. this approach answers the question raised by @xcite : "given a small collection of likely-looking cognates, how can one definitely determine whether they are really the residue of common origin and not the workings of pure chance or some other factor?", as the analysis is performed only on words that share a common etymology. we augment the dataset with the corresponding cognate in english (in the broad sense, since these are borrowings) for a subset of 305 of these cognate sets, using the same approach that was used for building the original dataset. foot_0 considering a romance cognate set and an english cognate candidate, both with latin etymology, we compare their etymons. if they match, we identify the english word as being part of the cognate set. one complete example of a cognate set in romance languages and english for the word architect is represented in we curate the obtained cognate sets and include high-quality annotations separating them into two groups according to their etymology (old borrowings and recent borrowings), provided by experts in linguistics. out of the total 305 cognate pairs, we find 105 old borrowings and 135 recent borrowings (while the rest cannot be assigned a clear label or represent errors). we provide more details on data curation and evaluation in the following section. ## qualitative analysis and interpretation while the initial hypothesis of an effect of the older versus more recent borrowings on semantic similarity was not supported by mean evidence, we tried to deepen our investigation by researching in detail a sample of cognate sets. we aimed to observe whether the fluctuation in the degree of similarity between the english virtual cognates, on the one hand, and their romance correspondents, on the other hand, could be more related to the transmission channel through which they became part of the modern languages' lexica. as we previously mentioned, the latin borrowings in english can date from very different periods of time: some of them go back to the period of direct contact between germanic and latin speakers (e.g. fork), many of them are borrowed via old french -thus having as a starting point in their semantic evolution the french meaning (e.g. camp) -, while a more recent cluster consists of loanwords taken directly from latin (e.g. precocious). we shall detail the particularities of each category by highlighting the degree of semantic similarity and by interpreting the causes of either divergence or closeness. the example of en. fork is illustrative for the semantic divergence that affected the relationship between an early loanword in celtic taken directly from latin and its romance virtual cognates. lat. furca designated "an instrument with two arms or prongs", as well as any "y -shaped piece of wood used as a support", including the "gallows". the distribution of meanings varied from one area of the roman empire to another, according to the prevalent socio-cultural domain in which a furca was used: the romanian descendent of furca designates the instrument used in agriculture, in spanish and portuguese it was specialized as an instrument used for punishment, "gallows", while in english it semantically evolved to designate a refined instrument for eating. the semantic similarity between the english word and its romance correspondents is thus very low (between 0.1 and 0.4 [french]), as the cognates reflect different semantic trajectories based on concrete socio-cultural realities. for the second category (lexical items inherited in old french, that were later on borrowed in english), we shall approach the case of en. powder "fine, dry particles produced by the grinding, crushing, or disintegration of a solid substance", borrowed from o. fr. poldre "finely ground and pounded substance" (registered with this mean-ing as early as the 12th century), inherited from lat. puluerem "dust". contrastingly, the other romance languages inherited the original meaning of "dust" as their main significate (ro. pulbere, it. polvere, es. polvo, pt. pólvora). that explains why the degree of similarity between english and french is higher than between english and the other romance languages (0.75 vs 0.5). another significant example would be that of en. camp "a place with temporary accommodation of huts, tents, or other structures, typically used by soldiers, refugees, or travelling people", highly divergent from its romance virtual cognates (ro. câmp, it. campo, fr. champ, es. campo, pt. campo, all of them real (and true) cognates sharing the meaning of "field"). in this case, the english word is a borrowing from fr. camp, in its turn borrowed from italian, that doubled the inherited form champ. as it was borrowed in french as a military term -in contrast to its virtual cognates specialized in the agricultural area -it continued the same line once it penetrated the english lexicon. the degree of similarity between en. camp and its romance virtual cognates is, thus, as low as 0.1 (or even lower for portuguese). the dataset we obtained also allows us to draw specific conclusions concerning the semantic fields where the degree of similarity is higher, regardless of the difference between real and virtual cognates, as well as of the channel through which they penetrated in english. thus, we may observe that the terms denoting concrete or at least experimentable elements, be they animals (e.g. en. eagle, ro. acvilȃ, it. aquila, etc.), specific materials (en. marble, ro. marmura, it. marmo, etc.), or seasons (en. autumn, ro. toamnȃ, etc.), show a very high degree of similarity (with the average value of 0.75), as a consequence either of their frequency (as postulated by the law of conformity, cf. @xcite ), either of the lack of change in the referent or in the speakers' attitude towards the referent. equally similar from a semantic point of view are the abstract terms that designate a very particular concept which could either be circumscribed to a restricted (scientific) domain (e.g. astronomy, industry, diameter, identity, liquid, etc.), or did not experience any polysemic developments (thus complying with the law of innovation, cf. @xcite ) (e.g. avarice, circumstance, convince, irony, presence, etc.). we should also draw attention to the words that were borrowed from latin in order to cover modern concepts, absent from the source culture. it is the case of en. consul "an official appointed by a government to reside in a foreign country to represent the commercial interests of citizens of the appointing country", ro. consul, it. console, etc., which show one of the highest degrees of similarity: although the word in itself existed in classical latin, it referred to a different political position, designating "one of the two highest magistrates at rome". parallelly, it is easily understandable why words modernly created in a determined scientific domain from latin roots have almost no semantic divergence from one language to another: once created in a contemporary language, they were naturally spread in the other languages, along with the concept newly invented. it is the case of en. nihilism, optimism, exhaustive, etc. ## conclusions we constructed a common vector space for english and romance languages cognate sets to analyse their similarity and thus track their semantic divergence. we analysed their similarity distribution and proposed some linguistic and historical hypotheses to explain their behaviour, especially for english cognates. an important byproduct of our work is the curated dataset, which can be employed in other work related to semantic analysis of cognates, borrowings or false friends. we plan to extend this study, as part of future work, to cognate similarity based on phonetic transcription and compare it to the current orthographic dataset. moreover, we will investigate more in-depth the automatic identification of the date a word entered a language. to this end, we need to obtain a dataset that contains this information. we intend to use and adapt @xcite to approximate the "age" of words.