CogNet: a Large-Scale Cognate Database

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 resource by various fields of lingustics.