Semantic distances among languages

Linguists Ana Sabina Uban and others in their article "Cross-lingual laws of semantic change" have a table of Average cross-lingual similarity between cognates (see N. Tahmasebi et al. (ed), Computational approaches to semantic change, p.232)

______Fr____It___Pt___Ro___En___La
Es_ 0.64_0.67_0.68_0.57_0.61_0.42
Fr_______0.64_0.61_0.55_0.60_0.40
It_____________0.65_0.57_0.60_0.41
Pt_________________ 0.56_0.59_0.42
Ro______________________ 0.53_0.40
En____________________________0.40


This means that Spanish and Portuguese, no surprise!, are the closest in terms of cognates (with a similarity score of 0.68), followed by Spanish and Italian (0.67), Italian and Portuguese (0.65), Spanish and French (0.64). The farthest is between Latin and French or Romanian or English (0.40). Although English is a language not even belonging to the Romance group, the cognate similarity between English and Spanish or French or Italian or Portuguese is greater than that between Romanian (obviously a Romance language) and the other Romance languages.