  Lexical Similarity (LS) between two languages uncovers many interesting
linguistic insights such as genetic relationship, mutual intelligibility, and
the usage of one's vocabulary into other. There are various methods through
which LS is evaluated. In the same regard, this paper presents a method of
Phonetic Edit Distance (PED) that uses a soft comparison of letters using the
articulatory features associated with them. The system converts the words into
the corresponding International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), followed by the
conversion of IPA into its set of articulatory features. Later, the lists of
the set of articulatory features are compared using the proposed method. As an
example, PED gives edit distance of German word vater and Persian word pidar as
0.82; and similarly, Hebrew word shalom and Arabic word salaam as 0.93, whereas
for a juxtapose comparison, their IPA based edit distances are 4 and 2
respectively. Experiments are performed with six languages (Arabic, Hindi,
Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu). In this regard, we extracted part of
speech wise word-lists from the Universal Dependency corpora and evaluated the
LS for every pair of language. Thus, with the proposed approach, we find the
genetic affinity, similarity, and borrowing/loan-words despite having script
differences and sound variation phenomena among these languages.

Computation and Language