Current approaches in Digital .Humanities tend to ignore a central aspect of any hermeneutic introspection: the intrinsic vagueness of analyzed texts. Especially when dealing with historical documents neglecting vagueness has important implications on the interpretation of the results. In this paper we present current limitation of annotation approaches and describe a current methodology for annotating vagueness for historical Romanian texts.

Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. We crosslinguistically investigate the semantic divergence of cognate pairs in English and Romance languages, by means of word embeddings. To this end, we introduce a new curated dataset of cognates in all pairs of those languages. We describe the types of errors that occurred during the automated cognate identification process and manually correct them. Additionally, we label the English cognates according to their etymology, separating them into two groups: old borrowings and recent borrowings. On this curated dataset, we analyse word properties such as frequency and polysemy, and the distribution of similarity scores between cognate sets in different languages. We automatically identify different clusters of English cognates, setting a new direction of research in cognates, borrowings and possibly false friends analysis in related languages.