The recent evidence for neutrino oscillations stimulate us to discuss again
the problem of fermion masses and mixings in gauge theories. In the standard
model, several forms for quark mass matrices are equivalent. They become
ansatze within most extensions of the standard model, where also relations
between quark and lepton sectors may hold. In a seesaw framework, these
relations can constrain the scale of heavy neutrino mass, which is often
related to the scale of intermediate or unification gauge symmetry. As a
consequence, two main scenarios arise. Hierarchies of masses and mixings may be
explained by broken horizontal symmetries.Comment: 25 pages, RevTex, no figures. Few misprints corrected and two
references adde
