Cognate Frequency Explorer
How are 5,688 Estonian-Finnish cognate pairs used across the runosong corpus? Scatter plot shows ET vs FI frequency; click any dot to see details.
What is a cognate?
A cognate pair is an Estonian and Finnish word descended from the same Proto-Finnic root — e.g. ET käsi ↔ FI käsi "hand", ET öö ↔ FI yö "night". This page asks: even when the words are the same root, are singers on both sides of the Gulf using them equally?
Reading the scatter plot
- X-axis — Estonian (ERAB) token frequency of the lemma across 2.4M verses.
- Y-axis — Finnish (SKVR + JR) token frequency.
- Dots near the diagonal are balanced — used at similar rates in both traditions.
- Dots above the diagonal are FI-dominant; dots below are ET-dominant.
- Click a dot to see the pair, its POS, raw counts, and a link to each lemma in the Lexicon.
Filters
- Balance pills (All / Balanced / FI dominant / ET dominant) — restrict to one dominance class.
- POS pills — restrict to nouns, verbs, or adjectives.
- Search — finds by either the Estonian or Finnish lemma spelling.
- Scatter / Table toggle — switch to a sortable table for ranking by total frequency or imbalance.
Why it's interesting
Strong imbalance in a basic-vocabulary cognate can signal a register difference, a tradition-specific theme, or simply an avoided synonym. Pairs with high total frequency but strong dominance are often the most telling.
| ET lemma | FI lemma | ET freq | FI freq | Total | Balance | POS |
|---|
Pair Details
Click a dot on the scatter plot or a table row to see details.