something really interesting about linguistic phenomena is that they often seem to operate on principles of equivalence that are completely contrary to how typical machine learning functions
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in phonology, for instance, we form equivalence classes of sounds on the grounds of not phonetic similarity but rather contextual non-overlappingness. a kind of anti-similarity
one of the core criteria for two phonetic sounds to be equivalent in a language is if those two phonetic sounds have strictly non-overlapping distributions
the more overlap they have, the LESS equivalent they are. similarity = difference