[Corpora-List] Phonetic corpora as a tool for language classification.

[sowa at bestweb.net]

The phonetic similarities of languages are strongly affected by the
phonetic background of the people who learn them.
> Why is Moldavian the closest to Latin?

French and Italian, for example, are
very close in vocabulary, but farther apart phonetically because the
people in Gaul who learned Latin were native speakers of language(s) with
very different phonological patterns.
I would strongly doubt that
Moldavian could have preserved the Latin sound pattern better than most
Romance languages.  A much  more likely hypothesis iis that the speakers
who learned it happened to speak languages that happened to have a similar
phonology.
The distance between  langauges should be measured in
terms of multiple factors, including syntax and vocabulary in addition to
phonology.
John Sowa
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