Cognate Frequency Explorer ? Help

What is a cognate pair here?

A cognate pair joins an Estonian and a Finnish lemma that go back to the same Proto-Finnic word — ET käsi ↔ FI käsi "hand", ET öö ↔ FI yö "night". The index pairs them in two ways, and only the first is a claim about form: lemmas whose spelling is identical or all but identical, and lemmas matched through the English translations they share. The second route finds many true cognates, but it also joins words that merely mean the same thing, so read a translation-matched pair as a meaning match rather than as an established shared root. Each pair's route is named in the detail panel.

Reading the scatter plot

• X-axis — how often the Estonian lemma occurs in the corpora, on a logarithmic scale.
• Y-axis — how often the Finnish lemma occurs. Neither count is restricted to one corpus: the coloured strip under each bar in the detail panel shows how the count divides between SKVR, JR, KR and ERAB.
• Dots near the diagonal are balanced — sung at similar rates on both sides.
• Dots above the diagonal lean Finnish; dots below lean Estonian.
• Click a dot to see the pair, how it was matched, its part of speech, raw counts, and links onward to the cognate and concordance pages.

Filters

• Balance (All / Balanced / FI dominant / ET dominant) — the dominant buttons take in both the strong and the milder lean.
• Part of speech — restrict to nouns, verbs, or adjectives.
• Search — finds by either the Estonian or the Finnish lemma spelling.
• Scatter / Table — switch to a sortable table to rank by total frequency or by imbalance.

Why it is interesting

A strong imbalance in an everyday word can point to a difference of register, a theme one tradition sings and the other does not, or simply a synonym one side avoids. Pairs that are frequent overall but strongly one-sided are usually the most telling.