  We argue that flavour mixing, both in the quark and charged lepton sector, is
basically determined by the lightest family mass generation mechanism. So, in
the chiral symmetry limit when the up and down quark masses vanish, all the
quark mixing angles vanish. This mechanism is not dependent on the number of
quark-lepton families nor on any ``vertical'' symmetry structure, unifying
quarks and leptons inside a family as in Grand Unified Theories. Together with
a hypothesis of maximal CP violation, the model leads to a completely
predictive ansatz for all the CKM matrix elements in terms of the quark masses.
Some implications for neutrino masses and oscillations are briefly discussed.
