  This work proposes a tentative model for the calculation of dimensionless
distances between phonemes; sounds are described with binary distinctive
features and distances show linear consistency in terms of such features. The
model can be used as a scoring function for local and global pairwise alignment
of phoneme sequences, and the distances can be used as prior probabilities for
Bayesian analyses on the phylogenetic relationship between languages,
particularly for cognate identification in cases where no empirical prior
probability is available.
