  Within the broad context of quark-lepton unification, we investigate the
implications of broken continuous family symmetries which result from requiring
that in the limit of exact symmetry, the Dirac mass matrices yield hierarchical
masses for the quarks and charged leptons, but lead to degenerate light
neutrino masses as a consequence of the seesaw mechanism, without requiring
hierarchical right-handed neutrino mass terms. Quark mixing is then naturally
small and proportional to the size of the perturbation, but lepton mixing is
large as a result of degenerate perturbation theory, shifted from maximal
mixing by the size of the perturbation. Within this approach, we study an
illustrative two-family prototype model with an SO(2) family symmetry, and
discuss extensions to three-family models.
