  The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in
the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville \cite{Urv}. He collected
comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the
Astrolabe from 1826 to 1829 and, in his work about the geographical division of
the Pacific, he proposed a method to measure the degree of relation among
languages. The method used by modern glottochronology, developed by Morris
Swadesh in the 1950s, measures distances from the percentage of shared
cognates, which are words with a common historical origin. Recently, we
proposed a new automated method which uses normalized Levenshtein distance
among words with the same meaning and averages on the words contained in a
list. Recently another group of scholars \cite{Bak, Hol} proposed a refined of
our definition including a second normalization. In this paper we compare the
information content of our definition with the refined version in order to
decide which of the two can be applied with greater success to resolve
relationships among languages.
